Tag: engineering

Philosophy is the Original Technology

If I were to expand on this, I’d say it’s like watching engineers attempting to construct a building but stopping at the scaffolding. Philosophy, after all, is the original technology. It’s the underlying framework that got us thinking about thinking. But most engineers don’t go beyond the surface—content with the Microcontroller Unit, that simple, mechanical, predictable loop; it’s a closed system, something controllable, with predictable inputs and outputs. Engineers often treat philosophy like they treat hardware: plug in what you need, discard the rest.

Yet, this approach—content to cling to the MCU, whether in its hardware form or as the Marvel Cinematic Universe—leaves so much unexplored. These crutches provide repeatable comfort in a chaotic world, like preferring a bland, reheated meal over something complex, nuanced, even risky.

Let’s take reproducibility. The idea is that everything can be remade, replicated, without degrading meaning. We teach engineers to value it as though the act of copying doesn’t inherently warp the original. But philosophy knows better—every reproduction is a slight twist on reality, each version a little further from the source, a game of telephone across generations of thought.

Consider commodification. Engineers often don’t realize they’re walking around with Karl Marx in their toolkit. In Marx’s framework, everything has a price tag, everything is transactional. To engineers, every solution is a product, every innovation has a dollar amount, which leads to a transactional view of the world. Then there’s component-level thinking, a Cartesian notion, reducing complex problems to smaller, simpler ones. It’s useful, sure, but it can also fragment understanding, turning nuanced phenomena into bite-sized bits that don’t really connect once they’re recombined.

Conformity—Émile Durkheim would have a field day. Engineers are taught to conform, to abide by the standards, the protocols, the regulations, the known safe pathways. But that can turn the human element into an assembly line process, stripping creativity in favor of reproducibility.

And then there’s the Paperclip Maximization problem, the drive for efficiency, optimization, and profit that can run amok. Engineers start by wanting to make one perfect thing, but in the process, they end up in a spiral of Bentham, Mill, or Weber-style utilitarianism where maximizing value means losing sight of the cost. The obsession with measurable metrics often ends in systems that churn out endless paperclips, even if it means dismantling humanity.

Risk aversion? That’s pure existential angst, straight from Sartre. Engineers often fear the unknown, preferring reliability to innovation. They’d rather stick to what they can measure, control, and predict, even if it means dodging the very questions that give life meaning.

Finally, we’ve got the technology-driven paradigm shift of McLuhan. Engineers are taught to worship technology, to place it on a pedestal. But McLuhan knew: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” This blind worship means forgetting that technology is a lens, not a life raft. It’s supposed to clarify, not obscure.

Each of these philosophical ideas, if engineers recognized them, would open up the entire world of innovation. But as it stands, they’re running around with the tools of the mind, but without the keys to understanding.

Something Wicked This Way Came

In the early 2000s, something quietly but profoundly changed in the heart of corporate America. For decades, the most successful companies had been led by engineer-CEOs, individuals who had built their empires through a deep understanding of the technology that underpinned their industries. These leaders were problem solvers, innovators, and often, visionaries who understood the intricate workings of the machines and systems they oversaw.

But then, something strange happened. The engineers began to disappear from the boardrooms, replaced by a new breed of leader—the MBA, the finance expert. These new CEOs weren’t tinkerers or inventors; they were strategists, market analysts, and efficiency experts. They spoke the language of quarterly earnings, shareholder value, and cost reduction. They didn’t build companies—they optimized them.

At first, the transition seemed logical, even inevitable. The world was changing rapidly, and companies needed leaders who could navigate the complexities of global finance. The tech booms and busts of the late ’90s had created a sense of uncertainty, and the thinking was that engineers were too focused on the product, too inward-looking to steer a company through the choppy waters of the new millennium.

But in their rush to embrace this new leadership, these companies failed to see what they were sacrificing. The new CEOs, with their sharp suits and slick presentations, began to make decisions that looked good on paper but missed the essential DNA of the companies they were now leading. R&D budgets were slashed, long-term projects abandoned in favor of short-term gains. The careful balance between innovation and profitability was tipped decisively towards the latter.

And so, company after company stumbled. Strategies that had seemed brilliant in the boardroom floundered in the real world. The relentless focus on cost-cutting led to a hollowing out of the very expertise that had made these companies great in the first place. The products became commoditized, the brand loyalty eroded, and slowly, the companies began to lose their edge.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, the consequences of those decisions are becoming painfully clear. The once-dominant companies are shadows of their former selves, unable to compete in the very markets they once defined. The finance-driven decisions that promised to safeguard the future instead sealed their fate. The future, it turns out, wasn’t in the balance sheets but in the ideas and innovations that had been left behind.

In a cruel twist of irony, the very qualities that the MBA-CEOs were brought in to manage—the volatility, the uncertainty—were exacerbated by their actions, leading to the decline of the giants they were meant to save.