Planned Obsolescence

When I hear the term “planned obsolescence,” I think of greedy businesspeople trying to trick consumers by either designing products with unnecessarily short life spans or devising ways to make functioning goods seem outdated in order to sell similar products in a different, supposedly better shell. Examples of this practice from many industries come to mind: cell phones, electronics, cars, fashion, textbook publishing. But not all obsolescence is planned. And not all planned obsolescence is bad.

As engineers, we have a certain degree of control over the life cycles of the systems we design. Usually, the longer the life span, the costlier the system will be. Taking into consideration other design performance parameters (e.g., sustainability, environmental impact, serviceability, safety, cultural significance, aesthetics, risk, social impact, and ethics), setting a reasonable limit on a project’s life cycle can be useful for controlling economic resources and avoiding overdesign of the intended objective. Making something deliberately obsolete can be good under the right circumstances. What if we had lingering, inferior systems and products that we never disposed of because we were too used to them—because they were too big to obsolesce?

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. —Buckminster Fuller

A famous, and now cliché, case study in inferior product design is the keyboard that sits in front of you every day. It is called a QWERTY keyboard, and it was initially designed by Christopher Sholes to separate the most commonly used keys in order to avoid the jamming of typewriters. Once keyboard technology improved and jamming was no longer a problem, more effective methods of arranging keys were developed. The most famous layout was the DVORAK by August Dvorak. But by that time it was too late. The QWERTY had become a standard, and people were unwilling to switch to something better because they were too used to the old way of typing. You can still try switching to other keyboard layouts, but even our cell phones’ digital screens carry the QWERTY and it is difficult to imagine this changing any time soon.

Another interesting example of inferior design is fossil fuel—powered vehicles. The documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? (Paine 2006) explores the efforts of several players to limit the development of electric-car technology in the mid-1990s. Again we ended up stuck with a less effective product, although some great accomplishments are being made today by Tesla Motors and other companies. In the future, we might see more and more electric cars on the road. If we can achieve some breakthroughs in battery and power-transfer technology, electric cars may be able to render fossil-fuel cars obsolete someday.

Try to think of other lingering systems, institutions, companies, or products that should be obsolete by now but that are still around.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives; nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. —Charles Darwin

The previous examples serve to set up an analogy for our own careers. How do jobs emerge in the first place? They emerge out of our individual and collective needs and wants. As those needs and wants change, jobs also change and adapt to the new context. And this change is what I want to talk about. Change can be difficult. The transition from the known to the unknown can be extremely disorienting—that is, if you are not prepared for it. One of the biggest changes we are currently facing is the automation of high-skilled labor by ever-smarter machines, technologies, and algorithms. We are biological machines ourselves, and it almost feels natural to create more complex and intelligent machines that can do more with less as time moves forward. And these advanced machines are great news, except for the fact that many people will have a hard time adjusting to the “future shock” (Toffler 1970).

Still, many outdated institutions and practices linger. As an example, let’s take a look at firefighters. Nowadays, less than 20% of the calls firefighters receive are about fires. With the development of postcombustion building materials and fire-preventing regulations, the need for firefighting is not as big anymore. You see fire departments everywhere because they are still necessary, but they probably could exist on a much smaller scale.

The leader’s main job is to make themselves obsolete. —Lao Tsu

Our decreased need for firefighters, or any other type of professional for that matter, should be celebrated. But transitioning to smaller numbers of professionals is challenging because it means fewer jobs are available. This is one of the fundamental career paradoxes that everyone faces: creative destruction occurs when a task can be optimized or rendered obsolete through ingenuity and technology.

Do you want to contribute to the end of your own job and those of your peers? In areas with less crime, fewer police officers are needed. Do police officers secretly want more crime so that they can keep their jobs? Do doctors and pharmacists want more disease and sickness instead of preventative care? Do lawyers want more conflict instead of nonlitigious agreements? Do civil engineers want the infrastructure report card to show a string of Ds instead of As?

These may seem like preposterous questions, but they give us some insight into the decisions we must make throughout our careers. Are you just trying to keep busy, make a living, and protect your own? Or are you after the most important contributions and innovations you can make, even if they risk your job security? Despite the obvious bias in my questions, there is no right or wrong answer. But you, your children, and your children’s children will have to face the consequences of your choices sooner or later.

Plus, the risk of losing your job can be mitigated by having a broad and deep axiomatic knowledge base, critical thinking skills, empathic ethical values, a good reputation and connections, and an excellent portfolio filled with what you’ve done, who you are, and what you want. You are not born with these items. You earn them. It is difficult, but so are all worthwhile things in life.

Speaking of what you want, many thinkers have given their take on the ultimate human desire. Some of their ideas are as follows:

Although all these words embody a tiny piece of truth and the concepts they represent are in many ways interconnected, none completely explains humans’ ultimate desire. This desire is probably a combination of the ideas in the preceding list and many others. But I do think that human society would benefit greatly if each person spent more time on flow, meaning, and discovering the unknown than on survival, pleasure, and power.

If you look at The Vision for Civil Engineering in 2025 (ASCE 2007), you will see that we engineers are tasked with integrating new technologies, managing threats, and leading decision making that will shape our public policies. So, do not be afraid to lose your job to a robot or program. Join the adventure and start building the robot or program that will replace you. Make your current job as obsolete as possible. Then you will have a new job that involves not just implementing technology and change for their own sakes—after all, garbage in equals garbage out—but helping to shape a better world by removing ineffective, vestigial systems and practices and aiding others in the transition. Whatever is left after that is what really matters anyway.

I cannot wait to start researching 3D-printed buildings; better integrated, more intelligent construction design and analysis software; infrastructure monitoring and self-healing systems; and self-assembling structures and to see what you and other people will be doing around the world in other fields. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. Because I know I am racing not against but alongside them. I hope you do too.