An Engineer’s Prayer to the Blue Fairy

Abstract

As I write this article, I feel like a little boy in front of the blue fairy (Collodi, The adventures of Pinocchio, [1]), asking her to grant me a few wishes. The fairy I address is human ingenuity, the collective abilities of millions of humans to innovate their way out to a better life. I would be very satisfied even if a few hundred engineers and students read these pages, and are stimulated to try to solve some of the problems discussed here. My own background ensures that I talk a bit more about Information Technology (IT) than about other matters; but, IT is not a branch of technology that works miracles in isolation. It has inter-disciplinary roles to play with almost every field of engineering and technology. IT becomes particularly valuable when it is used to solve practical problems, to make us live and work better. We need to think about IT driven changes in the socio-economic context, to derive their full benefits.