Practical wisdom in an age of computerisation

ABSTRACT

All professions are facing some formidable challenges including the ‘big three’ – climate change, pandemics and increasing computerisation. The potential threats include new uncertainties about unexpected extreme events, widespread predictions of job losses and the dangers of inappropriate unsafe automation. The opportunities include new types of jobs and new understanding of what civil engineers do, how they do it together with large scale improvements in effectiveness. Meeting these challenges requires us first to understand better and re-evaluate the overview of the services we provide. Secondly, we need to get a better handle on how we structure our problems to encompass both the ‘big picture’ and the detail and to use that structuring to develop workflow modelling tools that handle new sources of uncertain evidence such as AI and the IoT. In this paper I argue that we need to change the conversation about AI to one about AAI or Assistive Artificial Intelligence whilst recognising that the term AI will probably remain in general use. To do that we have to understand and communicate what is special about professional engineering expertise. We need a principle of ingenuity that ‘value, nurture and develop practical wisdom’ because it contains the crucial necessary qualities of professional engineering that cannot be computerised in the foreseeable future.

KEYWORDS:

• Systems
• project management
• information technology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

David Blockley is an Emeritus Professor of Civil Engineering and one-time Head of the Department of Civil Engineering and Dean of Engineering at the University of Bristol, UK. He graduated from the University of Sheffield in 1964 with a PhD in 1967. He worked for the British Constructional Steelwork Association in London before moving to Bristol. He holds a DSc from the University of Bristol, is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and of the Institution of Structural Engineers. He was President of the Institution of Structural Engineers 2001–02. He was a Non-Executive Director of Bristol Water plc 2003–2009.