Why Engineering Past Achievements and Future Goals Seem Different

I saw an article in IEEE Spectrum magazine (a magazine for electrical engineers) today that reminded me vaguely of recent partly tongue-in-cheek post asking why liberal politicians don’t have bigger dreams. Engineering Achievements: The Two Lists

The National Academy of Engineering put together lists of 20th century’s greatest engineering achievements and greatest engineering challenges for the 21st century. (I blogged about the energy-related items on the list two years ago.) The 20th century achievements include things like airplane and telephone. The challenges for this century include items like prevent nuclear terror and develop carbon sequestration methods.

The article asks why the old list involves discrete thing-like inventions that ushered in sweeping cultural changes while the new list involves social/cultural goals we’d like to see some sort of technology to address. The reason, IMHO, is the difference between hindsight and foresight. Looking forward we see a list of problems and risks we’d like to see addressed. The technologies of the future may solve those problems in ways we can’t foresee. For example, instead of finding ways to sequester carbon from burning fuel, we may find ways to adjust other areas of the environment to compensate for higher levels of CO2. The list of 21st century accomplishments, I suspect, will include discrete product-like technologies just as the our 20th century list does. “Carbon sequestration” and “Prevent nuclear terror” might be replaced by “nuclear fuel cell” and “subatomic particle scanner”.

When I consider our ability to produce things now that were unheard of 100 years ago, it makes me wonder how reasonable it is to compare GDP now with then. We are immeasurably wealthier now than then. The same thing will happen over the next 100 years. So we shouldn’t fret over GDP being flat for a few quarters, medicine getting a little more expensive, or houses getting a little less expensive. We need to keep teaching people math and science and to work hard, and in a century our great grand children will not even be able to measure how much wealthier they are.