Strategy Session

Your doctor just told you that you have a 90% chance of dying of a heart attack in the imminent future if you don’t change your lifestyle. Would you change right away, or wait until he tells you your chances are 99% that you’ll die if you don’t do something.

I’m betting you’d change your ways right away. And this was exactly the point that former Vice President Al Gore made today when he spoke at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose. Gore was referring to the climate crisis the world faces (we all know his involvement with the global warming issue), and the fact that scientists have released four reports that unanimously tell us that the climate change we are all so brutally aware of is real and we are the culprits.

Gore said emphatically to the engineers and technology experts in the audience: “We have to act.”

He hoped he was speaking to the choir, since the people in the audience represented a vast amount of brain power that can help solve the climate crisis. Said Gore: “Embedded systems have an increasing level of intelligence—they can play a big part in helping this crisis. Old legacy systems are very inefficient. Aiming toward system redesign is one solution to this problem.”

So, executives and engineers in the electronics industry: Are you ready for the challenge? Will the CEOs let their addiction to meeting their quarterly numbers overpower them from doing the right thing? Will the industry remain captive into the “inertia that keeps us locked into our old systems,” as Gore said? Or will we break out?

Gore said he thinks you can create the vision to help the world do something about the climate crisis. Identify where the wasted energy streams are going. Create a vision of embedded systems that are connected to microgenerating sources.

So, decades from now when the new generations look back at 2007, they will say, “How did they find the moral courage to do what they said was impossible?”

Gore says engineering can make this vision real. I thought his argument was very compelling.

What do you think? Are you ready for the challenge? Tell me what you think.

Debra Bulkeley, Executive Editor
Electronic Business