In 2003, the US National Academy of Engineering, a non-profit making, non-governmental organisation, published A Century of Innovation, a large coffee-table book about the myriad achievements of engineers in the 20th century.
From electrification and cars to nuclear power and water distribution, it was a fine record of a 100-year spell in which technology remade the world. But it also sparked questions. What would be the great engineering achievements of the 21st century? And what challenges would technology need to overcome to make the world a better place?
So, five years later, representatives from the US National Academy of Engineering, the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, and Beijing’s National Academy of Engineering met to seek answers to those questions. Together, they identified 14 Global Grand Challenges for Engineering. In July this year, hundreds of engineers and students gathered in Washington DC to discuss them. Professional Engineering was there to find out whether engineers are making progress with what Lord Alec Broers, a distinguished British engineer and a pioneer of nanotechnology, called “the world’s first engineering vision for the planet”.
Enthusiastic response
At the campus of the city’s George Washington University, engineers and students gathered from all over the world, each focused on tackling one or more of the 14 grand challenges, which have been identified as:
- Make solar energy economical
- Provide energy from fusion
- Develop carbon sequestration methods
- Manage the nitrogen cycle
- Provide access to clean water
- Restore and improve urban infrastructure
- Advance health informatics
- Engineer better medicines
- Reverse-engineer the brain
- Prevent nuclear terror
- Secure cyberspace
- Enhance virtual reality
- Advance personalised learning
- Engineer the tools of scientific discovery.
More than half the attendees were students, and there was genuine enthusiasm and readiness to tackle the problems facing our civilisation. There was a group from China who’d come up with special glass that could cut down on the need for air conditioning; a start-up firm from San Diego in California that had developed a device that provides an inexpensive and easy way to test infection levels in HIV patients; and a team from the UK's Bournemouth University that has developed a cheap, modular system for filtering drinking water.
Clean water was one of the most prominent themes of the conference. “We’ve still got thousands of people dying every week of water-borne diseases,” said Broers, who helped to devise the 14 challenges, and gave an update at the conference on progress so far.
.jpg?sfvrsn=37ddd912_0 "Preparing new generations of engineers was a major theme at the summit (Credit: National Academy of Engineering)")
Preparing new generations of engineers was a major theme at the summit (Credit: National Academy of Engineering)
The suggested approaches to the problem of providing clean water varied in technological sophistication. One used sound waves to filter out chemicals, while another employed nanomaterials that were activated by light. At the other end of the scale, a group from Buffalo University in New York state devised a system that relied only on some black paper and the power of the Sun.
Some grand challenges are aimed at undoing the unforeseen consequences of the previous century’s engineering achievements. A team from Manchester University, for instance, came up with a system for filtering pollution at street level with strategically placed aerofoils.
Providing energy from fusion, one of the most exciting challenges, could potentially cut the amount of pollution generated from coal and oil. There’s been exciting progress on that front since the challenges were launched in 2008.
Broers mentioned the experimental Tokamak reactor ITER, under development in the south of France, which uses a powerful magnetic field to confine and control plasma. But building full-scale fusion facilities will require engineering advances – better superconducting magnets, new materials that can withstand the high temperatures, and advanced vacuum systems.
As with some of the developments of the last century, there may be unforeseen consequences, or hiccups, with new technology along the way. Engineering was in the local, and then global, news the day PE arrived in Washington, when a security robot was found face down in a fountain at the harbour, a 15-minute walk from the conference venue.
Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, gave the keynote speech at the Grand Challenges Summit, and struck a note of caution about the new technology that we’re racing ahead with. He pointed out that his charitable organisation had funded the Berkeley cyclotron, paving the way for nuclear energy, but also for the development of the atomic bomb. “What are the cyclotrons of our day?” he asked.
Engineering ourselves
If the last 100 years were about remaking the world, in the 21st century expect a focus on changing the way we interact with it. Virtual reality (VR) was, said Broers, the last challenge added to the list. “We were at 13 challenges,” he remembered. “All of these things are problems. But engineers haven’t just created problems – we’ve done a huge amount to entertain the world and make life more joyful.”
There are still technical advances required to improve VR – increasing the field of view, maximising the resolution of the headsets to the same level as the human retina, and incorporating haptic technology.
.jpg?sfvrsn=5ddd912_0 "There is massive scope for Virtual Reality innovation, as these delegates are discovering (Credit: National Academy of Engineering)")
There is massive scope for Virtual Reality innovation, as these delegates are discovering (Credit: National Academy of Engineering)
“The reality we experience is constructed in our minds based on highly incomplete data,” explained Michael Abrash, chief scientist at Oculus, the technology firm that was acquired by Facebook after its VR goggles caught the eye. “It generally matches the real world well, but it is not an accurate representation of reality. So if VR can provide the right perceptual inputs we can have whatever experiences we want.”
Creating inputs to the brain is one challenge – another is learning to read its electrical signals. ‘Reverse-engineering the brain’ was, arguably, one of the most fascinating topics of the conference. It’s been brought into the public eye recently because of Elon Musk’s interest in the ‘neural lace’ concept that would allow us to control devices with our thoughts and perhaps even communicate telepathically.
But we need engineering to get us there. Currently, brain-machine interfaces are limited in resolution and usability – to get data from deeper in the brain you have to open up the skull. But at Cortera Neurotechnologies, Rikky Muller is working on “miniaturised and minimally invasive interfaces to the brain”.
She’s the first to admit that we’re still a long way from cyber-brain enhancements for most people, but the results of implants for certain conditions have been remarkable. Take Andrew Johnson, a 39-year-old with Parkinson’s disease who has had deep stimulators surgically embedded in both hemispheres of his brain. His motion is shaky and his speech slurred, until they’re activated – and he is instantly able to move normally.
It’s a remarkable, moving demonstration of the technology’s potential – a video of Johnson got a thunderous round of applause at the summit – and is symbolic of the prizes on offer if some of the 14 grand challenges can be cracked in the years to come.
Nine years after they were formulated, progress is being made on all fronts, but there’s a long way to go. Perhaps the most important people at the summit weren’t the esteemed engineers and experts, but the significant numbers of students in the audience, who might be the ones to crack fusion or come up with more efficient solar panels. Dean Kamen, founder of engineering outreach organisation FIRST Robotics, put it best: “The 15th grand challenge should be to create enough smart kids to solve the other 14.”