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@bakuninboys@aus.social

Post #621711

2026-03-11 01:45 UTC

I had an epiphany about sustainability and engineering a few years ago. This is during me learning about climate change, all its facets, what to do about it, etc. It's a bit lengthy, bear with me. If you look at the quintessential "engineering thing", it's a car. It's described as a system, where you take a bunch of parts (not very useful), put them together, and now they do something useful. The way to express this is that it's "greater than the sum of its parts". This works, but the explanation opens another question: OK but the car is part of another system, and in order for it to work it needs a constant input from that system (petrol). That input requires a bunch of other complexity and causes a bunch of problems. So the "car" as a system is actually the entire extraction chain to feed the car to do the work. Not exactly "greater than the sum of its parts". A bike, however, that does the business! A bunch of parts, put them together, boom! Greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, you need an extraction system to make the original bike, but the parts are there for their lifetime. You can recycle them after. Those aren't part of the "system" which you can look at as the "bike". Bike is a pure win. It's Engineering (tm). Now let's look at other things which engineers build which you can look at and see as "greater than the sum of their parts". You can see refrigeration, nice, (electric) cooktops / kettles / toasters and other renewable powered electric infrastructure, nice. Basically, everything that makes your house run is pretty great, and if you just wave your hands a little bit, say you have solar on your roof, that's powering the devices, great! System! What about software? Well, it's a bit harder, but overall the idea is that you need to communicate to solve problems, and instead of the artifacts being in the physical domain, you can compress them in software and that solves a problem. It's also electrically powered, no problem. Silicon itself can't be recycled, but the components can, and Silicon is "sustainable", there's a lot of it. System! OK hold that idea. 1/n

Replies (1)

  • @bakuninboys@aus.social 2026-03-11 03:01

    Now, engineers get a lot of accusations of "you're replacing jobs", but while economists reply with "people will get other jobs", engineers usually want to say "we are creating things which are more than the sum of their parts, so society needs less to do more. That's efficiency". Efficiency is also tied to sustainability, obviously. If you are using something at 2% efficiency, you might run out, but if it's used at 99.99% efficiency, you might have enough forever. There are economic laws around if something is used extremely efficiently society counter-intuitively uses more of it, but that's for economists. I'm here for engineering. There are two kinds of job replacements. The first is the one everyone knows: Replace artisans with industrial equipment. A lot of political change is associated with the technical change of industrialisation, and I'm going to ignore the politics -- let's say the people own the "private" property of industrial machinery. Movable type, large scale production, etc. The second kind, where a device is made for individuals to use, and that device automates a task. It "replaces" artisans, but also it is distributed among the people. That is, artisans themselves can take it and use it. A camera is a good example. This, I would say, is strictly better than industrial tooling but both have social ramifications that need to be adjusted for. So the question: Is industrialisation (both kinds) greater than the sum of its parts? On the one hand, unequivocally, yes. I can make a cup for a fraction of the price, higher quality, less material waste. Nice. But also, it'd be nice to have an artisan cup. Something made by hand. A single cup is maybe 20-40 minutes of work (amortised). You'd have to pay maybe $50-100 for a cup assuming you find someone who can do this for a living. I think this makes sense, right? The industrial machinery is still really valuable, but you'd ask people "hey, maybe if you can afford a nice cup, it'd be nice to have a nice cup", and maybe the government chips in to subsidise artisans. This way you get the efficiency, but you don't really lose the spirituality. But for purely aesthetic things, industrialisation does not create a one for one replacement. Obviously a camera does not make the same thing as a painting, and as painting has become more of an art, the more we can see they are not the same. It is not a difference in scale, but also difference in kind. Is that a "system"? Well, I'd say "yes, but also it's not a system which displaces labour in theory, only in practise". This kind of gets us to what is the practical purpose of purely aesthetic things? It's a long journey but I'm getting there. 2/n

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