Engineering Challenges
Sadly, the NSF is once again showing it’s altruistic colors (I guess I should never be surprised when an agency such as it is altruistic) with it’s recent announcement of the 14 engineering challenges facing the 21st century.
What a paultry list that confuses politics with engineering in over half of the cases. “Restore and improve urban infrastructure” is not an engineering challenge. Neither is “prevent nuclear terror.” These are political problems, as are at least half of the items listed. Taking the urban infrastructure as a single example. We know how to build infrastructure. By challenge I take it to mean, “something we don’t know how to do now.” Well, I think it’s pretty clear we know how to build cities. Maybe not cities that the politically correct want us to build, but for those of us who live in reality, the cities are great. The issue is a political one in that city governments (at least US major metropolitan areas) are typically the most corrupt and it shows in their urban cores. It’s really that simple. Reality cannot handle contradictions, it pays you back for your contradictions. Always. And we see it in the urban core. I could write an essay on the irrelevance of half of the list, but that would digress me from my main point. Which is, what are the *real* engineering challenges for the next 100 years.
So, here is my list of engineering challenges, in case you care.
- Commercialization of space (the engineering aspects, again, huge political aspects, we ignore those here, and won’t mention this again.) including routine commercial interplanetary travel.
- Programming the human (and non-human) genomes
- Direct human machine interfacing
- Extend human like conciousness indefinitely, either through life extension enabled by nano-technology or uploading into computers
- Nano technology to rework human beings, and multitudinous other entities
- Energy from Fusion (hey, they got at least one right….)
- Get computers to pass a real TuringTest.
- Create robots that can pass as humans (this is one the Japanese are taking very seriously)
Well, not bad for 5 minutes work, and a hell of a lot more interesting than the fluff from the NSF.