The U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) on Feb. 15 announced the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. A diverse committee of experts from around the world, convened at the request of the U.S. National Science Foundation, revealed 14 challenges that, if met, would improve how we live.
The final choices fall into four themes that are essential for humanity to flourish - sustainability, health, reducing vulnerability, and joy of living. The committee decided not to rank the challenges. NAE is offering the public an opportunity to vote on which one they think is most important and to provide comments at the project Web site.
The 14 challenges selected were:
- 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
Sure, as a list of problem areas we face, this is a good list. But as a list of 'engineering challenges' it is largely useless.
On some points they have pretty much right ('make solar power economical' for example) but in others the 'challenges' are either badly defined ("engineer better medicines") or not actually engineering challenges at all ('prevent nuclear terror' for example).
I have written more here - http://tomscrace.blogspot.com/2008/02/grand-challenges.html
Posted by: TomScrace | February 22, 2008 at 01:27 PM