Learning Engineering Practice – Help Needed for the 2nd Edition

I was honoured to receive a message from Taylor & Francis, my publisher, telling me that the book has sold very well and they would like an updated edition.

On my list for improvements so far are:

How AI can help early career engineers and pitfalls to avoid (ie which types of AI can be trusted to be helpful);
More emphasis on LinkedIn for job seeking;
Distinguishing different kinds of engineering work in the introduction: professional engineering, engineering technologist and engineering technicians;
Ideas for early-career engineers on how to apply an understanding of social and economic value generation in engineering practice; and
Influence of climate in low-income countries.

I need your help, please.

Please re-familiarise yourself with the book, and send me suggestions for improvements, including any of your own experiences that could help with the topics above. Also, if you really think a chapter or part of a chapter is not needed, please let me know. I want to keep the book as short and easy to read as possible.

Send me an email or reply to this post and start a discussion.

AI: Artificial Incompetence or Actual Idiocy?

I have watched AI pronouncements over the last year or so with great interest, like so many others.

It is 30 years since I argued at a robotics and AI conference, much to the horror and anguish of many computer science colleagues, that AI was better interpreted as artificial incompetence than intelligence.

Has anything really changed in that time?

In my 1992 book, Shear Magic, Robots for Shearing Sheep, I argued that so-called intelligent computers were illusions and that the greatest irony of artificial intelligence research is that it demonstrates how shallow our concepts of mind and intelligence really are. “All we have learned is that the thinking we associate with intelligence is the easiest part to replicate with computers.” Yet, every human shares perception and thinking abilities that, even now, we have not even begun to understand. If you think ChatGPT is intelligent, just ask it to drive your car to the office.

I must acknowledge that the ability of our machines to translate text into other useful languages has advanced. If you are very careful with the original text to avoid ambiguities and colloquial expressions, writing text that is as boring to read as possible, then translation into many languages is near faultless. Instruction manuals and legal documents translate easily, even with Google translate. I use DeepL considered to be better than Google, though with fewer languages.

In this post, I want to explain why I think that we are not going to see many of the great AI advances so many people have confidently predicted in the last year or two. Not for a while at least. I have fallen into the same trap myself: I confidently predicted that self-driving cars would be an every-day reality by 2017!

My argument is based on simple economics that I have learned by stumbling into marketing to help the world embrace Coolzy.

Every summer day, my team members scan digital dashboards to assess ROAS, our return on advertising spend. These days we place most of our advertising with Google through search ads, YouTube, and the shopping strip at the top of your search page, also display ads that appear on so many websites.

In Australia, for example, we aim for a ROAS of about five, meaning that we have to spend $100 on digital advertising to generate $500 of sales revenue. In Pakistan and Indonesia where Coolzy is so much more attractive, we can confidently aim for ROAS of 20 or more, sometimes more than 50. The reason why Google, Meta and the other vast digital platforms are so profitable is that advertising with them really works.

Let’s explore this a little deeper.

Typically, we pay Google or Meta around one dollar every time someone clicks on one of our ads and lands at our website. We pay a tiny fraction of that every time one of our ads is displayed on a screen, somewhere in the world.

Yet only one in a hundred website visitors buys a Coolzy, perhaps two on a good day with a threatening heatwave announced. That’s why we have to pay for those other hundred or so ad clicks.

If, like me, you enjoy tossing provocative questions at ChatGPT and Gemini, you are benefiting from the money we pay to Google for our ads. It is millions of companies like us, large and small, paying for digital advertising, that have made Google what it is today. Google and Meta live on advertising revenue. And the world only has so much money to spend on advertising.

A few days ago, Google announced their next big step in AI… Gemini. I asked it my usual questions like “tell me about Pakistani members of the Australian cricket team”. Gemini matched ChatGPT’s response last year, naming Usman Khawaja and Fawad Ahmed, an improvement on Bard that completely flunked the answer. In contrast, Bing’s new ChatGPT copilot only listed members of the Pakistan cricket team in its response this morning, a big backward step from ChatGPT last year. Many others have made similar comments.

Google, Meta, OpenAi and so many others are chewing through vast amounts of electricity and investors’ cash, running hundreds of thousands of nVidia gaming chips to build what are now known as large language models (LLMs), essentially vast networks of mathematical statistics that predict the next few words you are looking for without any understanding of what the words mean. The models emerge as they scoop up and process trillions of words from websites across the internet. Machine translation abilities rely on huge collections of documents appearing simultaneously in two or more languages. The UN and EU websites are goldmines for translation engines, reflecting the efforts of countless human translators over the last few decades.

Like many others now, I suspect that this huge expenditure of treasure and energy will disappoint in the end. Vast investments are vanishing like water into sand in the hope that some huge advance in advertising effectiveness will emerge, because it is only advertising that will sustain the successful winner in this race. And, something drastic has to change to make the economics add up because these LLMs are enormously more costly to run than traditional search engines.

So, back to Coolzy.

What would persuade me to pay $10 or even $50 to Google, Microsoft or even Amazon, for someone to tap on a Coolzy ad on their smart phone?

I would do that if, and only if the person that taps the ad is really going to buy a Coolzy. That means that Google, Microsoft and Amazon have to predict human behaviour ten times, or fifity times better than they can now. And I can’t see any sign of that kind of improvement, yet.

Recently I came across perplexity.ai, initially impressing me. I asked questions about Coolzy and its responses were so good that I am tempted to recommend it to our website visitors if our primitive chatbot can’t answer their questions. Perplexity have announced a copilot that engages a user in a conversation to help narrow down the focus of their ‘knowledge’ search. I thought to myself, Ah ha, this might lead be a search engine that really can find someone ready to buy a Coolzy. If it works for us by finding people ready to buy a Coolzy, I would pay far more than Google for their website visitors. The perplexity business model just might eclipse Google, or so I thought.

I put perplexity’s copilot through an extended test. I pretended to be someone looking for a low-power aircon that works in tropical humid heat, but with no knowledge of Coolzy. Sadly, perplexity’s copilot failed. I was more confused and frustrated by the experience than helped. Despite telling me that evaporative aircons don’t work in high humidity, it kept recommending the tiny USB-powered so-called air conditioners like evapolar that use water evaporation, and are little more than toys. They only work in low humidity and even then, only produce a tiny cooling effect.

Thinking about this, I realized that perplexity has perplexed itself because it cannot distinguish truth from faction, the vast quantity of facile text created by marketers to drive search engines to misleading websites, building upon confusing ideas that even engineers cling to about air conditioning. Hence artificial incompetence.

For a decade or more, commercial and respectable website builders alike have been seeking Google search rankings that depend on vast amounts of text that mention something that might be relevant for a potential visitor, but the text does not need to be either factual or logical. Now, one of the main applications being touted for ChatGPT and Gemini is producing faction even faster to attract search engines, increasing the pile of meaningless internet content exponentially.

I am helping to build a website about the history of engineering in Western Australia. Despite the large quantity of carefully researched text there, Google ignores it because it thinks the site is unlikely to attract a paying customer. Perplexity knows about it, but not Google.

LLMs, therefore, seem to have become imprisoned by the marketing industry that has created vast quantities of meaningless text to promote website Google search rankings. LLMs are not much good at generating anything logical anyway. They regurgitate a digested form of the garbage that represents so much of the internet today. In universities, we struggle to help our students distinguish the small quantities of reliable information out there.

Even academic publishing has become an ever-growing archive of papers, most of vanishing significance, that few people ever read apart from the authors. Academics are rewarded for publishing papers, not reading them.

LLMs will need to be able to distinguish truth and logic from faction if they are to provide anything reliably helpful. And that will take a long time, I suspect.

I often wonder whether the AI hype all been a ploy by the IT industry to seduce investors once more. The industry has monopolized the venture capital supply for two decades without creating appreciable productivity gains. The transition to renewables and electric vehicles is taking an ever-increasing share of investment capital, casting shade over silicon valley’s cathedrals.

Roger Penrose argued that biological intelligence relies on quantum effects (see his book, The Emperor’s New Mind). He inspired physicists to work on quantum computing, until recently flagged as the next great step in AI. However, I suspect that practical applications are still decades away.

Is AI really taking human civilization to the next inflection point?

Yawn.

It’s time to talk about Coolzy. No LLM will keep billions of people cool in the coming century.

Image by Anca Gabriela at umsplash.com

PS: WordPress now offers to generate a summary of my post (presumably using AI). I tried it an immediately discarded the result which was so mind-numbingly more boring than my own writing. If that’s the future of writing, the internet will become humanity’s greatest garbage dump even faster! Bring back books, please.

Engineering in developing countries

Are you working as an engineer or teaching engineering in a developing country? Or thinking of working in a developing country? If so, this blog post is particularly relevant for you.

It’s also relevant if you wonder why so many poorer countries remain poor. It’s not just because of corruption and mismanagement. There is much more to this issue.

Much of my research effort over the last 20 years has been to understand why engineering practices in India and Pakistan are so different from those in wealthy countries like Australia.

I discovered that the cost to deliver engineered goods and services of equivalent quality, durability, design, reliability and fitness for use is nearly always significantly higher in poorer countries. Among other factors like climate, this helps to explain why poorer countries find it so hard to develop prosperous economies.

My latest research paper on this topic has appeared in the Southern Journal of Engineering Education, edited by an enthusiastic team of young researchers led by Bruce Kloot. They gracefully allowed me to exceed the normal length limit. Yes, it’s a relatively long paper. However, it’s a complex story too.

Continue reading →

Flowers at Jasmine Hills

My wife and I are fortunate to have a special place 120 km south-east of Perth where we can relax and take time out to write. Books come from there. We call that place “Jasmine Hills”.

It’s an extra special place because of the amazing wildflowers in the natural “bush”, protected by a conservation covenant. At this challenging time, it helps to appreciate some of the beauty than nature has endowed us with. Maybe that can be a way for all of us to set aside conflicts and do something to help preserve our collective endowment for future generations.

My hobby is photographing the 400+ different varieties of flowers in our bush areas. I am still finding new wonders every time I take my camera, and I thought it is time I shared a few images with you to enjoy at this time of celebration. Feel free to share the link with your friends so they too can enjoy these beautiful creations.

They images should be enough for you to put Western Australia on your bucket list. With around 60% of all the known varieties of flowering plants in the world, nearly all unique to Western Australia, it is truly wonderful place to visit.

Engineering Heritage – Construction of Narrows Bridges 1956 – 2006

As engineers, we often complain that the work of engineers is often overlooked in the history of human development.

Historians then point to the lack of source materials for them to work with. They are not really interested in the technical aspects of artefacts such as tools, bridges, machines, electrical supplies and so on. However, they are really interested in the people who created those artefacts, how they were used and how they influenced the behaviour of people at the time.

This is why recording and preserving our engineering heritage is so important. I started volunteering with the engineering heritage community of Western Australia last year, and the further I get into it, the more fascinating it is becoming.

Here is a recent achievement, even though it is work-in-progress: a detailed account of the construction of the Narrows Bridges in Perth.

While any large bridge is an impressive artefact, it’s easy to lose sight of the personal stories behind it. Working on a large bridge, particularly one in a prominent location like these ones in front of the city, is an aspirational goal for any civil engineer. However, the high-pressure realities and psychological stresses involved in bridge design and construction can be a rude awakening. Some engineers walk away with psychological scars lasting decades.

Continue reading →

Where’s the value in climate-smart engineering?

It was a privilege to be invited to lead a discussion on this at the recent Climate Smart Engineering conference by recorded video because I had to be in Pakistan for a family wedding at the same time.

Coolzy.com is my daily work: a portable refrigeration cooling machine running on just 300 Watts that provides the lowest cost personal cooling solution around, with minimal climate and environmental impact. That’s a nice illustration of climate-smart engineering. The need is critical right now! https://bit.ly/3uNY5H2

But it’s not so easy for many engineers to understand how their work creates economic, social or environmental value.

To help engineers better appreciate how their work creates value, Bill Williams and I have updated our Guide for Generating Value in an Engineering Enterprise, first released in 2017. It’s needed just as much today … Tell us what you think.

Continue reading →

The Little AC that Can

I was brought up on the story of the little engine that could, taking on a seemingly impossible task with the mantra “I think I can… I think I can… I think I can… I think I can…”

We at Coolzy think we can help avoid many gigatonnes of CO₂ emissions. Read and tell us if we’re wrong.

I have just returned from a month in Pakistan where the temperature in our bedroom never dropped below 30 °C, the upper physiological limit for sleeping with a powerful ceiling fan for cooling.

We slept comfortably with our Coolzy and an Igloo bed tent.

Coolzy and Igloo tent which my wife and I have used in Pakistan for 10 years now, sleeping in a first floor bedroom which reaches 40 °C. Like most houses in Pakistan it’s made from concrete with solid brick walls and no insulation at all, even on the roof.

Lives, health and prosperity across South Asia and many other countries will increasingly depend on artificial cooling. While only a tiny minority routinely enjoy air-conditioning today, perhaps 2%, a huge expansion lies ahead according to many predictions. However a large increase in greenhouse emissions will come with that expansion, adding as much as 13% of today’s global emissions when we need to get emissions to zero by 2050.

Can Coolzy help? We think it can.

Thanks to the 2016 Kigali amendment to the 1972 Montreal protocol, the international community has agreed to phase out refrigerant gases that damage the ozone layer, and also gases that cause significant climate warming. Some of the latter gases cause thousands of times more warming than an equivalent amount of CO₂ – the value for any particular gas is its “global warming potential” (GWP).

With the large-scale change from using fossil fuel to generate electricity to renewables such as solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro-electric power, also to nuclear power generation, the emissions of CO₂ associated with electricity generation will fall significantly over time.

As a result, emissions from air-conditioners will fall from about 2035 onwards.

Broad global adoption of Coolzys can contribute an additional large reduction in emissions, but only when Coolzys have significantly eliminated the use of split air-conditioners, from about 2040 onwards.

We think Coolzys can reduce overall global emissions by 17 GtCO₂, about half the current annual global emissions, about 35 times Australia’s current emissions. This document explains how in more detail .

Coolzy Environmental Impact 221206 Download

Even if the use of conventional air-conditioners does not increase as many have predicted, Coolzys would increase human health, well-being and capacity for productive work, enabling faster progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

So how can Coolzys slash global emissions?

With the Igloo bed tent, a Coolzy delivers much the same comfort for sleeping as a split air-conditioner running on 5 or more times the amount of electricity. Darkness is significant – using solar electricity will rely on storage, significantly increasing the cost. That’s why many hot, low-income countries will continue to rely on fossil fuel electricity for decades to come: they need power at night for cooling.

The refrigerant gases in conventional air-conditioners will be around for decades too, with global warming potential a thousand or more times that of CO₂. Coolzys use only 100 grams of propane inside permanently welded pipes. If it escapes, the climate impact is negligible in comparison, only 300 grams of CO₂ compared with two or more tonnes of CO₂ equivalent global warming from a conventional air-conditioner.

Using so little power, only 100 – 150 Watts per person, Coolzys cause far less emissions from burning fossil fuels, or far less investment in solar panels and batteries.

Anyone using a Coolzy instead of a conventional air-conditioner is saving around one tonne of CO₂ emissions every year. A billion people doing that would save around a Gigatonne of CO₂ emissions. Can we scale up to reach that level?

Coolzys are cheap to manufacture in bulk with between a third and half the materials needed for a conventional air-conditioner.

For people who cannot afford an energy-hungry conventional air-conditioner, people who today have to go without healthy sleep for months at a time with indoor temperatures in the high 30s up to 40 °C, Coolzy is transformative. With Coolzy, people regain their capacity for productive work, and babies no longer have their brains and bodies literally cooked in their first year of life. And yes, our experience shows that people with very low incomes by Western standards will buy them. It’s just a matter of time.

We are now selling Coolzys in more than 30 countries around the world, from Australia and Indonesia to Europe and the USA.

We will need massive investment, and we think that will come… soon. We think we can do it. What do you think?

If you’re sweltering in the European and USA heatwaves now, why not order one right now and try it for yourself? (Please note that Igloo tents are still on their way to Europe and USA.)

It’s Hotter than I Expected

Visiting Islamabad at the height of summer is not everyone’s idea of fun. With Coolzy to keep me comfortable, I can enjoy the superb mangos in season at the moment. For a week, the temperature in our bedroom hovered around 38 – 40 °C, but with the Igloo tent, we slept through the nights, not noticing the load shedding.

However, I was surprised.

On one of the cooler days I used a simple thermocouple data logger to record the temperature just outside our open window, on the inside of the wall, and also the air temperature at 40 cm above floor level, around the height of our mattress.

And here is the result over two days and a night.

Two Indian Engineering Disasters in a Week

A rail crash killed 275 people in Odisha, a $200 million bridge collapses for the second time in Bihar.

Politicians look for engineers to blame. Economist Ashoka Mody’s great book “India Is Broken” suggests instead that corrupt politicians, around a third of whom face criminal charges, are to be blamed.

Seeking individuals to blame is likely to obscure the real causes. These and hundreds of smaller, less notable engineering disasters every year result from organization failures, not individuals.

Unfortunately, there is still considerable ignorance about engineering practices, even among our own engineering communities.

Effective engineering at its best can be extraordinarily dependable: think about the amazing rarity of serious aircraft crashes given that tens of thousands of aircraft are flying at any given moment. We have known for decades that air safety depends on high reliability organizations that allow for human error. Multiple layers of organization and technological barriers keep us flying in safety, so people can make mistakes and the organizational systems protect us from the consequences, almost always.

Physiological Effects of Hot Climates

(Updated June 20, 2023)

Temperatures in Delhi reached 46 °C this week. How does this kind of heat affect people?

In my last post “Why do most hot countries remain poor?” I summarised explanations by influential economists and geographers. I reviewed the quantitative evidence that demonstrates the strong inverse link between climate temperature and economic productivity.

Of course, a correlation does not necessarily imply a cause.

23 years on, we now have research on physiology that has helped us understand a little more on how people are affected by hot climates. While there are still large gaps in our understanding, there is now little doubt that cooling is essential for economic and social development, even more so as climate warming raises temperatures everywhere.