It’s good to see a bit of vision — of looking beyond the next two to four year election cycle. The U.S. National Academy of Engineering [NAE] just put out a press release from their Boston annual meeting, announcing the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century.
“Tremendous advances in quality of life have come from improved technology in areas such as farming and manufacturing,” said committee member and Google co-founder Larry Page. “If we focus our effort on the important grand challenges of our age, we can hugely improve the future.”
The panel, some of the most accomplished engineers and scientists of their generation, was established in 2006 and met several times to discuss and develop the list of challenges. Through an interactive Web site, the effort received worldwide input from prominent engineers and scientists, as well as from the general public, over a one-year period. The panel’s conclusions were reviewed by more than 50 subject-matter experts.
The final choices fall into four themes that are essential for humanity to flourish — sustainability, health, reducing vulnerability, and joy of living. The committee did not attempt to include every important challenge, nor did it endorse particular approaches to meeting those selected. Rather than focusing on predictions or gee-whiz gadgets, the goal was to identify what needs to be done to help people and the planet thrive.
…The Grand Challenges site features a five-minute video overview of the project along with committee member interview excerpts. A podcast of the news conference announcing the challenges will also be available on the site starting next week.
“Meeting these challenges would be ‘game changing,’” said NAE president Charles M. Vest. “Success with any one of them could dramatically improve life for everyone.”
The NAE has set up a special website to anchor a worldwide community of people interested in advancing any of the challenges. Most of the site sections I have examined include a public comments capability. These are fully-moderated comments, so let us hope that these remain useful [it is an enormous challenge to the site administrators to do this].
Included is a short 6.5 minute video, produced to promote the challenge concept to non-technical audiences.
Here are the fourteen challenges, NOT in priority order [you can assign your own priorities and defend same in the comments]. I’ll just note that #3 which I interpret as meaning “PROVE sequestration methods at industrial scale”, is absolutely essential if we are to have any impact by 2050 on carbon emissions. This was also the conclusion of MIT’s “Future of Coal” report — see this earlier post:
- Make solar energy affordable
- 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 personalized learning
- Engineer the tools for scientific discovery
The committee is comprised of eighteen very-seriously-sparkly scientists and engineers — including some I respect enormously. E.g.,
W. DANIEL HILLIS, chairman and co-founder, Applied Minds Inc.
DEAN KAMEN, founder and president, DEKA Research and Development Corp.
RAYMOND KURZWEIL, chairman and chief executive officer, Kurzweil Technologies Inc.
JAIME LERNER, architect and urban planner, Instituto Jaime Lerner
LARRY PAGE, co-founder and president of products, Google Inc.
ROBERT SOCOLOW, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, Princeton University Environmental Institute
J. CRAIG VENTER, president, The J. Craig Venter Institute
I recommend that you bookmark the website, then revisit regularly for updates on the project.
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