Gore challenges Embedded Designers at ESC 2007

Source EE Times

Al Gore's keynote address at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose stressed the role of his audience in dealing with the climate crisis, which he referred to as "the moral imperative of our day" and compared it to the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union. "For the most part, the effect of population on our climate is balancing itself out over many years, while technology has dramatically accelerated the rate of which the climate has been affected over the past 50 years," he said. "We need to have a much finer-grain mix of money and intelligence in generating our public policies that affect this crisis." Designers must rethink systems to eliminate the "grossly inefficient systems running or energy economy," and create architectures that are built around the idea of energy efficiency, he said. Among his recommendations was to incorporate parallel processing in our day-to-day lives to "alleviate inefficient computing paradigms." Gore also noted the loss of interest in science and engineering among U.S. students, and that designers can impact this trend by displaying the way engineers can change the world and avoid crisis. If the threat level posed by climate change could equal that of Sputnik, the concept could achieve a "moral authority" for change, he said. "Once the possible threat was understood, President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon was achieved fairly quickly."