Can you imagine living your life in a world without electricity or modern electronics? How about the acts of doing math, writing, entertaining yourself and your family, cooking, without the centrally supplied tools and utilities of modern life we are used to today? What would you do in case of a war, an adventurous trip abroad gone awry, or an emergency situation?

Enabling tools and applications are extremely valuable to society because of their ability to increase efficiencies and convert time spent on trivial tasks into time spent on other, more valuable things. In a corporate world labor optimizing business to business tools allow us to receive products at much lower costs, and live a lifestyle that few of our ancestors were able to support, and still today, many countries with less developed infrastructure are aiming to achieve. As engineers and entrepreneurs we have two paths to innovation. Constructing tools that allow us to do things we could never do otherwise, or constructing tools that simplify and optimize tasks that were more time-consuming before.

Yet, sometimes I wonder if we are not debilitating our children and ourselves with our heavy unquestioned use of digital tools and applications and lack of practice in a life without them. In our personal lives, we are relying on more and more external resources to do everyday tasks, that we are essentially forgetting how to do them by ourselves. What is more interesting is that nobody (but maybe Girl and Boy Scouts) is really investing in preserving the knowledge of how to do the tasks previously done by humans, that are now driven by electrical and digital tools.

In how many homes would you see a solar-driven calculator, with no external battery, placed next to a manually powered flash light, and manually or solar powered drilling tools, data carrying devices (other than paper based), communication devices, such as solar powered pagers, or radios, or even a book on basic survival without electricity or working electronics? With or without available electrical power, these devices could be used and be energy preserving in every day life. Do we even have courses for people in non-electric mechanical engineering? Is anybody cashing in on building such tools?

On the other end, how much math or writing can children nowadays do without calculators or computers? How about adults? Can they navigate with a paper map and a compass? Do we even have a compass at home? Many developing societies don’t yet have that problem but in developed societies, a sudden lack of enabling tools could be disastrous. How would you survive in a world without utilities like electricity, gas, or telecommunications?

Posted by: Diana Zink on Thursday, 1st May, 2008