Entropy: Humanities in Engineering

I study Humanities and Social Sciences at an institute of technology in India. That may sound odd to many of you, trust me it did to me too. Interestingly, I shared a class with the future engineers on a course titled Technological Progress and Human Values, and to me, that was the beginning of a new narrative.  Could you imagine a professor walk into a classroom full of engineers (and a humanities student) and declare that Kafka's The Penal Colony is the most imaginative description of a machine? I couldn't, until then. The system of education that they and I got familiar with did not encourage us to think why a piece like The Penal Colony was written at a time electricity became a reality of everyday life.

We are at a moment of transition, a shift from Industrial age to an Information age. Therefore it becomes important to gradually progress from a discipline-specific approach to the idea of interdisciplinarity. The transition period is usually the time of worst disorders. However, disorder always exists. When my engineering class got me interested in entropy, I couldn’t find any difference to the idea of disorder that I was familiar with. Thermodynamics was the beginning of the industrial age when James Watt revolutionized the world with his steam engine. When the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy of the universe is always increasing, information age saw Shannon’s information entropy. Precisely what Albert Camus spoke in his Myth of Sisyphus, the same disorder where Sisyphus is in a similar action of establishing a local entropy by rolling the rock up the hill. Interestingly we are all trying to do it in our society, to build an order.

I was a techno-phobic most of my life, but two years of interaction with mostly engineers in my daily life amused me and I experienced the sublimity of technology. When Naji helped me download a software to keep a track of my email recipients (stalk), Afi gave me lectures on the geotechnical failure of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I am sure that my stories have found a place for themselves inside their heads too, like why the meaning of life is 42 in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to moral dilemmas of Billy Biswas in The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. People told me our logics differ, however, I disagree. Would it be possible to prove 1+1 = 2? it is all about inductive reasoning. I remember the story Balyakalasaghi by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, the hero Majeed in the story suck at numbers, and when his mathematics teacher asked him to solve 1+1=? on the blackboard, Majeed drew a longer 1. In the story, everybody laughs at him. However, when we think about it, he applied the same inductive logic.

Humanities is all about asking questions and Engineering about solutions. The problem with our technical education system is that we create solutions, without asking too many questions, that ends up being non-useful. I think it is important for students of Engineering to be introduced to accounts of people like Kentaro Toyama, an award-winning computer scientist who moved to India in 2004 to start a research project for the Microsoft. Toyama's team developed electronic devices for poor schools aiming development and human welfare, a decade later he found that it did not make any change in the social situation. He concluded that techno-solutionism is a myth, he did not devalue technology, he said technology on its own cannot bring in social change that we need people along with it. When MIT of the west have one among the world’s best Humanities and Social Sciences departments, where are the IITs? I say this as IITs were modeled on MIT, I know it is bad to play the blame game. Nonetheless, it is important to understand that we are at the age of transition, and it is all about interdisciplinarity and collaboration to meet the entropy. It is not just finding solutions to necessary questions; it's about identifying powerful narratives too.

A professor of literature, in her farewell speech, spoke about her experience of teaching literature to young management students, where a student asked her “ What is the ROI (Return of Investment) of Kabir?”. This is probably the question most students and academicians of humanities face in a world where everything has become quantifiable. The question suddenly sparked my insecurity of being a second-class citizen in an institute of technology. She asked us not to feel insecure as we have quietly made our mark in the space, importantly in the culture space, she said she feels extremely happy to see a boy hug his girlfriend on the corridors, where previously there was hardly any conversation between the two genders. You may criticize me for writing this, I did not mean to state that the humanities folks are highly sensible and the technical folks are socially weird. No, not what I was trying to build,  but why don’t we think about it in the world scenario where we read plenty of newspaper articles on men and women booked for molestation in professional space? Can humanities play a role here? I guess yes, narratives stay with people, and good narratives could be encouraged to read. Remember how Harper Lee educated the American public on morality, racial discrimination, and ethics with her book To Kill a Mockingbird? Ethics can never be taught, but it could be inculcated into an educational system. I believe, today,  more than anything we need to teach our children compassion, empathy, morality, ethics and the centrality of human existence for the growth of humanity along with technology.  Ironically, I write this piece while my college debates whether they need humanities education in a technical institute where the “scientific temper “ of the students should be encouraged rather than reading stories.