Challenges For Scientists and Engineers
Rapid changes in our environment and our societies are forcing us to become more conscious of our role in the world. Science and technology are employed in a worldwide competition for military and economic power. The impacts of this competition have global implications. We have entered a phase in which global developments are in conflict with basic requirements for human survival. Large stocks of weapons of mass destruction, the overexploitation of limited common resources, and a heavily unbalanced world economy provide fundamental challenges to human civilisation and may even threaten its existence.
Engineers and scientists play a key role, both in developing new knowledge that might threaten international security and in providing positive solutions for the future. They are as much a part of the problem as they can be a part of the solution.
Read more about this topic: International Network Of Engineers And Scientists For Global Responsibility
Famous quotes containing the words challenges and/or scientists:
“A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can’t tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)