Preface Writing this book was an opportunity for me to thank my teachers, my peers, my students, and my people on the occasion of completion of 50 years of my graduation in engineering. So far it has been a wonderful journey. I am still learning. I have not forgotten how I began my journey. I have received more from my students and peers than I could give back to them. I have learnt that aesthetic development of the senses is as important, as the intellectual. I have learnt, more than the mind, it is the heart that makes a teacher. A mere intellectual teacher is a mere abstraction of facts. Teaching is truly an inward human activity. Education has always been preparation for life and liberation of the self. “If knowledge continues to increase, the world will need wisdom in the future even more than it does now,” said Bertrand Russell. The goal of wisdom is to comprehend the deeper meaning of known facts, and for that, a combination of cognition, self-reflection and openness are necessary. Wisdom is about knowing what to overlook. Wisdom is understood at the experiential level. We are observing momentous developments in the sphere of science and technology. The question we ask is: Should we leave the destiny of man in the hands of science alone? Man belongs to two different worlds - the world of natural necessity, and the world of moral freedom. A proper balance between the two will be the major challenge for man in the coming years. We are moving very fast in the material world, and if we want to avoid vortex formation in our lives, we must place moral baffles at appropriate places in the fluid-filled bucket, called life. Man was once the weakest animal on this earth. He wanted to survive, yet he did not have inherent means for survival. The armoury he developed for his survival included capacity for thought, imagination, ingenuity, and self-awareness. Man is now the most evolved species. With the development of reason and conscience, he emerged from nature; he is now ‘fully born’, ‘fully awake’, and ‘fully human’. He is the sum of ‘inherited’ and ‘acquired’ qualities. He is product of gene and society. He now wants to rewrite life.

Neural suitcase determines the size of our world. We think. We imagine. We generate ideas. We make sense of things. We take decisions. We observe patterns, and then try to understand their significance. Our neural suitcase does all this. It tells us the tales of many minds (1). The tales are beautiful, vulnerable, quiet, chaotic, real, fictional, wise, foolish, friendly, hateful, meaningful, and blind. Our neural suitcase builds castles in the air. It determines the size of our world.

Science has individual, social, and institutional dimensions. Because of the social relevance of science, the dissemination of scientific information is crucial for its progress and contemporaneity. A scientist observes and then tries to make sense of that observation. She/he collects data, develops theories, uses hypothesis to understand and explain a thing, or a phenomenon, and then tries to find patterns emanating from her/his observations. Scientific knowledge keeps on changing. Science is a blend of logic and imagination; therefore, there is always a possibility of disagreement and mismatch between them. A hypothesis is often untestable. Such untestable hypothesis are often rejected by the scientific community. “Science never pursues the illusory aim of making its answers final, or even probable. Its advance is, rather, towards the infinite yet attainable aim of ever discovering new, deeper, and more general problems, and of subjecting its ever tentative answers to ever renewed and ever more rigorous tests,” writes Karl Popper (1). A scientist formulates, corrects, or discards the theories. The job of a scientist is to discriminate false idols from the real things. Science has built-in error correcting machinery, writes Carl Sagan (2). The error bars are insistent reminders to the fact that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It is used to exercise self-criticism. Each generation of scientists reduces the error bars a little. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes with facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. Sagan believed in maintaining an essential balance between the two attitudes: openness to new ideas, no matter how counter-intuitive they may be, and the most ruthlessly sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.

Progress of any nation is driven by human curiosity and ingenuity. Engineering is one profession that has shown humanity the ways to meet its needs. It made the forces of nature work for the good of mankind. The biggest challenge for engineering profession has been its integration with the human needs. Engineering transforms technical conscience into applied realities. On the one hand, engineers are not limited by technology, and on the other, they are worried about the risks to the environment, health, sustenance and safety. Engineer is a composite; “He is not a scientist, he is not a mathematician, he is not a sociologist or a writer; but he may use the knowledge and techniques of any or all of these disciplines in solving engineering problems.” Engineering in the broadest sense, relates to the “development, acquisition and application of technical, scientific and mathematical knowledge about the understanding, design, development, invention, innovation and use of materials, machines, structures, systems and processes for specific purposes.” Engineer works under various constraints: nature, cost, safety, environment, ergonomics, reliability, manufacturability and maintainability, among others. This is how Neil Armstrong described himself, “I am, and ever will be, a white- socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer — born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.”

There is no better engineering than life. What is life - is a perennial question. Life is defined in different ways depending upon who is defining it. Biologists define life using a list of characteristics, such as metabolism, evolution, homeostasis, constant transformation, genetic information, etc. Life has been defined as self-maintaining and self-producing systems. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1), argued that living organisms escape the destiny of disordered equilibrium because they are able to take up ‘orderliness’ from their environment. Philosophers have defined life from different angles. They say that life can only be understood fully from an ‘insider’ perspective. Life is not a random collection of extinct molecules. It is a process of dynamic renewal; everything in life is constantly turning over and renewed. Life exists in diverse forms. Each form is specialised to survive and reproduce in its particular niche. One understands life from one’s own perspective. For some, life is an ‘objects in flux’ that constantly exchanges matter with the environment. It is systematic material exchange into an organized body. Then there is a view that says that all living organisms deserve moral consideration. All living organisms, however, do not have equal moral significance; vertebrates, for various reasons, deserve more moral consideration than would bacteria or plants. Then there are myriad religious ways to define life. The simplest is “God created the world and all living organisms.” No further questions, accept or reject the hypothesis.

The way technology is evolving, and the way it is changing our ways of living, why should we not be optimistic about technology. But then optimism comes tagged with pessimism. We aim for unfathomable optimum optimism. Technology is like water. It finds its open spaces. If it fills the available spaces more than it should, there is flood. Future engineers and technologists are expected to appreciate, more than before, the human dimensions of technology. They are expected to have a grasp of the global issues. There is a need to understand the nuances of working in a culturally diverse space. According to some experts, good engineering designs should not be deprived of the benefits of a broad spectrum of life experiences, as adequate familiarisation with societal demands is essential for practical technological literacy. Future engineers need to be better equipped to deal with people of diverse backgrounds, such as from social sciences, management, and communication. Some of the grand challenges that are enlisted, from an engineer’s point of view, are environment protection, hunger, energy and controlling the spread of the diseases. We need developers of responsible technologies and products. We need managers to manage things, and at the same time we need adequate number of things to manage. There is a need to build faith in the public that engineers and technologists are sensitive to their concerns. One of the biggest responsibilities of the engineers and technologists is to keep themselves updated about professional developments and practices. Countries, not only want exceptional scientists and engineers, but also people who are temperamentally innovators, and think they fit into their country’s core values. Many would say, prepare young minds and nurture future innovators.

“I think that there is far too much work done in the world,” writes Bertrand Russell in In Praise of Idleness. Rightly so, a workaholic is not necessarily a valued employee. Why we work, asks Barry Schwartz. Why for most of us work is monotonous and meaningless? Why we have twice as many “actively disengaged” workers in the world as there are “engaged” workers? Do we work only for money? Some think, work is about pay and nothing more. It is true, people work for money, but not always. Many people work for the challenge, meaning, and engagement it brings. “The lesson here is that just how important material incentives are to people will depend on how the human workplace is structured. And if we structure it in keeping with the false idea that people work only for pay, we’ll create workplaces that make this false idea true,” writes Schwartz.

The manuscript was completed in February 2020. The book was supposed to be out in print form in April 2020. In between the pandemic changed the world. Obviously, world changing events can’t be left out of the book, particularly if the book is about the future of science, engineering, technology and humanity. I, therefore, requested the publisher of the book for the inclusion of a chapter COVID crisis and its impact on the future of the world. He readily agreed. I am sincerely grateful to the publisher for allowing me to include issues relevant for the present book, as an additional chapter at the end of the book. The subject at the moment looks unending and it has so many dimensions. I have tried to cover them as briefly as possible, in the context of the book. In spite of the several difficulties due to this last minute inclusion the publisher has taken pains to include it. I am grateful to him for his gesture. The pandemic of this proportion is expected to get the views/suggestions from equally large number of people. Everyone is eager to see the end of the pandemic. And everyone has realised that the world will be a much different place. Some people are hopeful that the problems will be resolved, of course using multi-dimensional approaches. Not many are sure of the time frame. There is also pessimism among common people. One of my aunt’s asks me - what kind of research we have been doing all these years that we can’t even face the challenges posed by a mere virus? Has the balloon of the technology busted by a miniscule virus? In this fluid time many questions are being asked, and as many answers are also emerging. It is a big issue. It is as big as that emerged after the Second World War. Some are calling it the ‘birth of a new power’.

1. Mindset Defines the Contours of Life 1. Purnendu Ghosh, Neural suitcase tells the tales of many minds, Partridge, 2014. 2. Ferris Jabr, Why we need to study the brain’s evolution in order to understand the modern mind, Scientific American, September 20, 2012. 3. David DeSteno, The truth about trust: How it determines success in life, love, learning, and more, Hudson Street Press, an imprint of Penguin Group, 2014. 4. Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Renshon, Why Hawks Win, Foreign Policy, October 13, 2009. 5. Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music, Plume, 2007. 6. Nicholas Carr, It doesn’t matter, Harvard Business Review, May 2003. 7. Ellen J Langer, Mindfulness, Da Capo Press, 1989.