Julie Feest, CEO of business/education linking charity EDT, surveys the current thinking on future skills and why the arts are increasingly seen as important subjects of study for engineers
Last year Mark Cuban, the US billionaire tech investor, predicted that liberal arts graduates in subjects like English, philosophy, or languages would soon be in greater demand than programming or engineering graduates. Earlier this year at a science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) education event, HRH The Prince of Wales made the case for the return of creative arts to the school curriculum. Now, the latest McKinsey analysis of future skills demand in the US and Western Europe has predicted that demand for arts-associated skills such as creativity, empathy, adaptability and entrepreneurship will grow at a faster rate to 2030 than demand for skills like technology design, engineering and maintenance, advanced data analysis, and scientific research and development. What’s going on? Why are people suddenly talking about STE(A)M skills, not STEM, where the A stands for Arts?
Our role at the charity EDT is to put business and education together to inspire young people into STEM industry careers through experiences of industry and, through projects and placements, to help them develop the future skills that will be needed by industry. We therefore watch skills trends very carefully and discuss with industry the way they can work with education to get the skills that they need in future recruits.
A recent development demonstrates the sort of issues we need to take on board. IBM’s most recent AI project called IBM Project Debating is designed to explore using AI for formulating arguments on subjects, and then listening to and then responding to counter arguments. A human audience in a trial concluded that the AI’s arguments had better substance than its human protagonists, but it failed to communicate them as effectively.
This sort of experiment gives glimpses into a future where AI is able to draw on a much wider range of information than could be processed by a human, can develop conclusions and lines of argument from this material and can respond logically to alternative ideas and suggestions. Add to this AI’s ability to handle complexity and undertake repetitive tasks and calculations efficiently then you can see how AI could replace human experts in many fields of activity, including branches of engineering.
So, what possible roles might human engineering professionals have in future industry? We need to identify those areas in which humans will have an advantage over automatons in the foreseeable future and build these skills in the workforce and future recruits, to be used in combination with their engineering expertise.
Skills in which humans have advantage are thought to include creativity and ingenuity – the leaps of conception and understanding which take projects into entirely new areas. Related to this is entrepreneurialism, which can involve creative and intuitive risk taking, and adaptability, seeing issues from range of different angles and taking novel approaches.
Communication and social intelligence is another key area, it is interesting that the IBM Project Debating AI struggled to communicate its superior knowledge and arguments and, while these aspects of AI will doubtless improve, it is reasonable to think that humans will continue to be superior in relationship and communication, particularly where that communication involves other humans.
Ethics and philosophy were particularly mentioned by Mark Cuban; the use of AI may well throw up considerable ethical and philosophical issues. The most obvious is the self-driving car problem – in an accident situation does the car’s AI protect the occupants who have paid for the AI, or does it protect innocent bystanders at the expense of those occupants. How will the values of AI be established and controlled?
These elements of human advantage, creativity, empathy and ethics are all developed and nurtured through arts disciplines, which is why arts is now seen as a crucial element of the armoury of skills needed by workers in STEM industry.
So, engineering and technology expertise will continue to be needed, but to be in real demand engineers will need the other future skills I have briefly explored here. Students and early career engineers would do well to train themselves in these areas – perhaps by becoming STEM ambassadors, inspiring young people into STEM careers. There is little more effective in developing creativity and people skills than standing in front of a group of young people and seeking to inspire them into a future engineering career.
For teachers and employers, we need to keep an open dialogue about the needs of future industry; how we enable our young people still at school to see the career opportunities and how we give them the blended STEAM skills that they will need.
“arts-associated skills such as creativity” This generalisation is complete rubbish.
Engineers are far more creative that arts students. Playing music, studying history, media studies require no creativity. Writing and composing are creative, but how many arts students do any of that after they have graduated.
look around you. How much of what you see has been created by Arts graduates and how much by Science & engineering graduates?
No – the problem is that there’s no synergy between the artists and the engineers at colleges or universities at the moment. In their learning my engineering students have to do everything: the initial ideas, design options, project planning, production drawings and prototype development, testing, final reports and then: manufacture, marketing, distribution plans and make plans for the final disposal. At every stage there are opportunities for either the artists or the business and IT specialists to contribute, but all the learning pathways are currently isolated from each other. I believe we must aim to break down the ridiculous barriers between the disciplines (generally created by the funding streams) to make STEAM a reality.
Douglas Adams had it about right:
“Well, you’re obviously being totally naive of course”, said the girl, “When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have, you’ll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.”
The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford.
“Stick it up your nose,” he said.
“Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know,” insisted the girl, “Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?”
“And the wheel,” said the Captain, “What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project.”
“Ah,” said the marketing girl, “Well, we’re having a little difficulty there.”
“Difficulty?” exclaimed Ford. “Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It’s the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!”
The marketing girl soured him with a look.
“Alright, Mr. Wiseguy,” she said, “if you’re so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.”
I agree wholeheartedly with Ian Downie. When asked what I do I always reply, “I am in the creative industries, I am an engineer. ” Create is what we do every day. The crisis holding back progress is the dire shortage of engineers, not musicians, media types and other arts graduates who are in plentiful supply, and often underemployed.
Sir Charles (CP) Snow was there (and here) before us all! The Arts and Sciences, the Two Cultures as he described them interlinked and inter-related and ability in both essential to the development of a well educated person. His writings are well worth a re-visiting. Unfortunately, in my view, those trained (but if they know no science or mathematics they are not educated?) in the arts have had ascendancy for far too long: long enough to bias the thinking of those at the summit of our flawed society to believe that it should remain so! Richard M makes excellent points.
I believe that the word engineered originated with the meaning of ingenious creation.
And arts means skills.
That should, I hope, give a sound basis.
Unfortunately, as Snow implied, these aspects of science (knowing/understanding) are not appreciated…
Perhaps it could be pointed out that scientists being creative (playing) developed much of the understanding that enabled modern musical instruments.
It does seem that when there is funding or training for creative businesses/innovation this is not for scientific application.
And perhaps students at school and college could be schooled in creative/research skills (“creative arts”)…possibly some history of science (from the humanities side) might help too.
Engineering software certainly requires understanding, creativity and empathy for users and their NEEDs – and I hope that is in the school computing curriculum now; it certainly seems to have missed business managers and politicians.