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TECHNOLOGY
AND INTERFACE CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Hugo
De Man
Em.
Prof. K.U.Leuven
Senior
Fellow IMEC
The enormous
wealth creation of the 20th century was based on two technological
revolutions: the first was based on
fossil fuel energy and led to the invention of engines that took over manual labor and created
mechanical mobility. The second was based on electricity as energy carrier,
allowing the easy distribution of energy to factories in order to produce material
goods.
The
key production factors were manual labor and capital.
This
century is not business as usual
Will the 21st century be more of the same? And what
technologies will dominate? How will these technologies interface with people
and how will they help to solve the challenges of the 21st century?
These are the questions we will try to tackle in this article.
In
the 20th century we behaved as if the earth’s resources and capital
were limitless. However, by
mid 21st century we will be confronted with limited non-renewable resources such as
cheap fossil fuel, and in coming decades, we will reach the quantum limits of computation when
transistors will reach atomic dimensions. Moreover, especially western society
will have an aging population to be supported by an ever-shrinking active
population resulting in exponentially rising healthcare costs.
Therefore the
21st century will be a century of considerable
technological challenge requiring a global long-term strategy if we want to keep today’s level of
prosperity for coming generations and all of humanity.
The last two decades of the 20th century were dominated by the
exponential growth of the computational power of the silicon chip resulting in
the appearance of personal computing, Internet and cellular telephony.
As
a result, the 21st century began with the third
technological revolution based on ICT but this will
soon be followed by an explosion of bio- and nanotechnology and their
convergence with ICT, cognitive sciences and with social sciences to assess the
safety and ethical issues of these emerging technologies.
These
emerging technologies create a knowledge economy where knowledge and brain labor- rather than
manual labor and capital-will become dominant production factors for the
creation of added value to services and intelligent objects that improve quality
of life and well-being, create spiritual mobility and lead to a sustainable world.
As manufacturing technology is rapidly moving east, added value in the
west must come from convergence of emerging technologies to serve the local
lifestyle and culture.
Convergence of technologies in itself is a way to explore new frontiers and
applications, needed to cope with the grand challenges of the 21st
century. This is not only a matter for scientists. The budget for coordinated
research on converging technologies to solve the above challenges must come from
a political awareness that solutions will not arrive overnight when the
exponential vertical tail pops up 30 to 50 years from now. Hence the
responsibility of politicians, the media and education is daunting if we want to
ensure prosperity for future generations. Neither political correctness nor
emotional decision-making (emocracy) provide the answers here.
Objective technological literacy and clear communication between
scientists and the public are essential. Writing more white papers – an
unmistakable talent of the European world – does not help. There is an urgent
need for action. This is what Rita Colwell, former director of US National
Science Foundation, states about the hesitation to act: “We need to
anticipate and guide change in order to design the future of OUR CHOICE, not
just one of our making.”
Let us dwell
over some of these challenges. First let’s look at the
changing world of ICT and its approaching convergence with biotechnology and
nanotechnology on the nanometer scale. Remember: 1 nanometer = 1 billionth of a meter). We will then
focus on to the real challenge of the 21st century, namely to create the technology
to support a sustainable world. Finally, the author wants to call for more
scientific literacy and training of renaissance engineers in order to make it
happen.
The changing world of
ICT
Let
us first consider ICT: at the end of the 20th century, ICT was mainly PC centric,
certainly after a decade of spectacular Internet growth, which transformed the
PC from an individualized professional device in the eighties into a
communication device for every citizen. Indeed, between 1995 and 2000, the
Internet and mobile phones changed the way we communicate, work, socialize and
do business.
Today, cellular voice telephony has taken over fixed telephony and forms
the basis of mobile connectivity. All this is driven by the famous Moore’s law,
stating that the number of transistors per chip doubles every 18 months. As a
consequence, the compute power of the chip has increased by more than five
orders of magnitude in 35 years.
This has created our information society where almost all human
activities now have an E- or an I-prefix.
But that is only the beginning since we are gradually entering the
Post-PC era.
Indeed, Moore’s law of further miniaturizing (scaling) of the transistor
will most likely continue for another 15 years, at which time we will reach
atomic dimensions on the nanometer scale. We will then be limited by the laws of
quantum mechanics and, if no new compute paradigms are found by 2020, we will
have to use our imagination to exploit the nevertheless unprecedented compute
and communication power reached at that time.
Another consequence of Moore’s law is that the energy per computational
and communication task also decreases exponentially and this is rapidly leading
to a proliferation of wearable, battery operated, electronics providing
broadband wireless access any time, anywhere.
But besides this scaling of the transistor often called “More Moore”, we see a whole set of
so-called “More than Moore”
technologies popping up. More than Moore technologies are microelectronic
technologies that are compatible with chip technology but provide spectacular
advances in interfacing people to their physical and biological ambient.
The most important “More than Moore” technologies
are:
-
Sensor and actuator chips: sensor chips transform physical quantities
into electrical signals for further information processing by the More Moore
chips. Actuator chips do the opposite; examples are camera chips (eyes), micro
mechanical mirrors (image creation), temperature, air and food quality sensors,
etc…
-
Polymer or plastic electronics: the discovery of semiconducting
plastics leads to cheap ways to print electronics on large flexible polymer
foils.
-
Micro packaging techniques or extreme miniaturization of packaging chips
into cubes smaller than a few cubic millimeter also called “smart
dust”
The combination of “More
Moore” and “More than Moore” is
rapidly leading to the Post-PC service centric era where ICT will
almost invisibly contribute to more comfort, safety and health. More in
particular:
1. Every person will have a broadband wireless Universal Personal
Assistant (UPA) that will interface
him/her anywhere, anytime to other people and to all objects in his/her
environment.
2. Smart wireless sensor and actuator chips will give
all objects and living beings eyes, ears and senses and provide us with smart interfaces to the
material and living ambient.
3.
The advances in polymer
electronics will lead to large
flexible electronic displays such as electronic newspapers, smart wall paper, new
ways to publicity, adaptive clothing and to cheap RF identity tags in all objects and
people. In
an RFID
– radio frequency identification – system the transponder
that contains the data to be transmitted is called an RF
tag. This will have a deep impact on logistics, security checking and
authentication.
4. Extreme miniaturization and
packaging electronics to smart dust size will lead to the creation of
invisible but smart ICT interfaces around every person
and object. ICT will become invisible to people and help to improve quality of
life if we can manage the challenges of making things simple, reliable, secure
and safe.
Already
today, we are rapidly entering a world in which ICT
is embedded in nearly all objects and in every living being. Therefore we speak
about “embedded systems”.
Today ICT is already embedded:
- In white goods such as smart refrigerators that keep stock for
you, autonomous vacuum cleaners and smart home robots.
- In photography and video that have become entirely digital such
that content becomes exchangeable from wherever you are at anytime. The user now
can become consumer as well as producer of content.
- In clothes with built in infotainment, navigation and health
control.
- In smart purses that remind you not to forget your home
keys…
- In smart shopping carts that allow for electronic payment and
that, via wireless Internet, learn from your smart refrigerator that you need
some more beer…
- In
healthcare where experiments are underway with tele-medicine and with
non–invasive wirelessly controlled micro surgeons and localized drug delivery.
Healthcare will become personalized.
- In all
forms of mobility to control safety, comfort, navigation and energy
efficiency and environmental control.
- In smart
mechatronic production machines such as weaving machines, automated
factories and warehouses, ultra-precise lithography machines for chip
manufacturing whereby embedded intelligence creates the added value that may be
the handle to prevent delocalisation of manufacturing of such machines to
Asia…
But, most importantly, all these objects will have wireless connectivity
to the Internet as in the example of the shopping cart and the refrigerator
while sensors and actuator chips provide them with senses and limbs. Objects
will also have localisation consciousness via GPS or emerging cheap nano radar
chips.
Embedded systems provide the technology for so-called ambient
intelligence.
Towards Ambient
Intelligence
The concept
of “ambient intelligence” has been
launched by Philips Research and is now
a generally accepted concept that drives a lot of technology development
worldwide.
Ambient
intelligence refers to a vision of a world whereby secure, trustworthy computing
and communication will be invisibly embedded in everything and everyone. It will
create a pervasive, context aware electronics ambient that is adaptive and
sensitive to the presence of people.
It will be
embedded in our smart home, in our personal assistant to augment reality, in our
flexible newspaper display, in our car, in our clothes for infotainment and
health monitoring and even in smart pills for painless diagnostics and
non-invasive healing.
Ambient
Intelligence (AmI) results from the convergence of the three ICT technologies mentioned
above: ubiquitous wearable distributed computing, ubiquitous wireless
communication and the sensor-actuator and extreme miniaturization technologies.
AmI will
change the way people experience their physical environment and requires a
holistic design approach starting from societal needs to technology and not the
other way around, as was all too often the case in the past.
Key to AmI is
that ICT makes sense to people and is extremely simple to use. This is what
Philips and many other consumer electronics companies today indicate by the cry
for “sense and simplicity”.
However, more sense and simplicity is subject to the so-called
“Claasen’s law”
or the logarithmic law of usefulness. It states that a linear increase in sense and simplicity requires an
exponential increase in system complexity or otherwise formulated: the user of a
certain system experiences only the logarithm of the system’s complexity. In
that sense, the transition from vinyl records to CD’s is experienced by the user
as a step towards smaller and handier recordings with less vulnerability to
scratches. However the electronic circuitry is at least 1000 times more complex
than for vinyl records. Advances in chip and cheap laser technology made it
possible.
Going to sense and simplicity makes us enter an era with society
driven technology and not the other way around as in the past. In addition
AmI ICT is service and content-oriented in the first place and the largest
economic profits are now in the services and the content whereas hardware
technology becomes an enabling technology or a mere commodity be it of
unprecedented complexity.
This withdrawal to the background of the enabling technology not only
creates a new business model. It also makes the engineers coping with such
complexity less and less visible. This may be one of the reasons why fewer and
fewer young people are interested in a technical career at the precise moment
when they become more and more necessary to manage the exponential complexity
growth due to sense and simplicity. This paradox requires action to make
young people aware of the societal impact of technology and the role they can
play.
Ambient intelligence will indeed have an impact on all aspects of
life, from well-being to urban life, the creative industry, care of the elderly
and automotive aspects. Examples of the direct impact on urban life include
lighting, safety, beautification, social control, personalized information, city
guidance, traffic control, etc. With regard to the creative industries, we can
mention applications like collaborative gaming, interactive entertainment and
arts, 3D home cinema, and interactive arts.
The above
examples clearly show that design of AmI systems requires a holistic approach starting from the
personalized user experience and then transforming that into global ICT systems
that make sense to the user. However, coming back to engineering education, we
notice that classical engineering schools are not yet adapted to this way of system centric design, which is
multidisciplinary, and team-based by nature. This will require the creation of
generations of ‘renaissance
engineers’, a subject that will be taken up later in this article.
An example of a smart environment can be found in the living room of the
Philips Homelab in
Eindhoven: today we struggle with tens of remote controls and a mixture of
devices and cables. In the near future these devices and screens will make way
for a ‘home dashboard’ from where we can control heating, lighting, audio and
video, including the walls, which will consist of large polymer displays where
you can project your favorite relaxing view or the digital television or a
conversation with a family member or friend in another part of the world.
AmI
will surely play a role in the development of possible solutions leading to
safer traffic and better mobility The EU wants to reduce
the number of traffic deaths by one half by 2010. This will save 100,000 lives
in a ten-year period. In that sense, IMEC together with Bosch and Philips has
developed a micro-sensor that prevents over excited drivers from missing a
turning. In addition, the European
car industry, together with the European semiconductor industry is working on an
electronic car cocoon that prevents collisions and corrects dangerous actions by
the driver.
Cars will
also be networked and able to communicate and smooth traffic problems over very
large areas, especially in cities.
But
there are other cross-disciplinary initiatives emerging: the world’s largest
chip manufacturer, Intel – remember: Intel Inside – recently hired 100
anthropologists to anticipate technologies for future societies.
Journalist Michael Fitzgerald from MIT’s Technology Review reflects upon Intel’s
motives and the impact: “Why
is Intel, the giant chip maker, in the process of hiring more than 100
anthropologists and other social scientists to work side by side with its
engineers? While the success of this strategy will become clearer over the next
12 to 18 months, it is obvious Intel is betting that sales will rise and new
markets will emerge because of this non-intuitive pairing. (…) Intel has already
released several products shaped by anthropological
research.
In February 2005, it worked with a Chinese PC maker to release the China
Home-Learning PC; and in October 2005 it launched the iCafe initiative in China,
which involves a platform for improving how Internet café owners deploy and
manage their technology. Intel has also repeatedly demonstrated early production
versions of a Community PC, which is aimed at markets where infrastructure is
not as well developed as in the West. That platform will be introduced first in
India later this year. In all these new ventures, social scientists have had "a
real impact," says Pat
Gelsinger,
a senior vice president at Intel.” A
very strategic move indeed, knowing that innovation and creativity will
definitely emerge from cross-disciplinary approaches.
Health and Care
Enormous investments and interdisciplinary research projects are set up
world wide with regard to technologies promoting personal health and wellness
activities, technologies supporting informal family and friends care networks
and technologies for telemedicine, remote diagnostics and virtual physician
visits.
Another example of Intel’s innovative strategy is a particular research
program developed by Intel and six top US universities called ‘Aging in
Place’,. AmI
systems are being designed to keep the elderly out of expensive specialized
nursing facilities and extend their independent living experience. The IBBT project ‘e-Health and elderly
care’ goes in
that direction too.
These kinds of initiatives and research projects can create a win-win situation between economy and
healthcare otherwise, within 20 years, the aging population will become a
great burden on healthcare and on the active population. As an example, Intel
has estimated that a 5-year extension of autonomy for Alzheimer patients will
lead to a 31 billion dollar savings in healthcare
costs.
IMEC,
together with a number of universities, recently started a
program for health monitoring whereby patients are equipped with non- invasive
micro sensors and actuators that communicate with their UPA and, in case of
emergency, interface to care centers that may interactively take responsive
action. A practical case of interest at present is prevention of epileptic
seizures by continuously analyzing EEG-signals and feeding corrective action
back into the brain. Developing such systems requires years of system level
research and technology development in cooperation with medical and psychology
specialists. It requires true cross-disciplinary team skills typical of the
convergence trend in technology development.
This
technology leads to preventive medicine rather than drug-based therapy. It may
completely change the pharmaceutical business, as it will reduce the consumption
of drugs. As with every change in society, this will take time and, besides
scientific action, political action to create a win-win situation between the
economy and society.
Figure 1:
The concept of a disposable biolab-on-chip. A few micro liters of body fluids on
a lab-on-chip are analyzed in minutes rather than days in a macro biolab.
Example shows a lab-on-chip developed at IMEC in the context of the PAMELA IST
project for very fast blood
analysis to determine the presence and amount of Prostate Specific Antigen,
which is an important parameter in the diagnosis and follow-up of prostate
cancer. The lab-on-chip is composed of three
parts: 1) a
piezoelectric transducer, 2) the transducer/ biological interface and biological
probe molecules, and 3) the microfluidics system leading the blood to the
bio-interface. After blood sampling, the chip is introduced into an electronic
reader to derive the PSA content from the change in resonance frequency of the
piezoelectric transducer.
Another trend
in this domain is the appearance of the biolab-on-chip that allows for the
early diagnosis of disease markers, leading to personalized healthcare thus
again reducing healthcare costs. A biolab-on-chip is based on “More than Moore”
technologies such as micro fluidics. We can etch micro channels and valves as
well as micro reaction chambers on a silicon chip that performs as a biolab on a
microscopic scale. The advantage is that this is much cheaper, operates on micro
liters of body fluids and produces results much faster.
Other biolabs
consist of chips with thousands of antibodies to identity DNA.
Last but not
least, major breakthroughs are occurring in ear and vision prosthesis. Cochlear
implants today already provide hearing sensation to otherwise deaf persons if
stimulation of hearing nerves is still possible. Work on
vision prosthesis at North Carolina State University shows a chip stimulating
the vision nerves based on wireless information provided by camera chips built
into spectacles. These
are examples where a direct interface is created between ICT and living
tissues.
These are the first steps towards convergence of bio-nano and ICT technologies
on nanometer scale.
The
ICT-Bio-Nanotech convergence
In ten years
time, electronic components will reach nanometer dimensions and we can expect a
convergence of ICT, Bio and Nanotechnology as well as Cognitive sciences. This
will also require close interaction with human sciences and sociology because
the impact on society and human life will be enormous from the viewpoint of
ethics, security, safety, and quality of life…
Nano-electronics is a new name for microelectronics as the dimensions of
the transistor today are below 100 nanometer. Today’s most advanced processes in
production have reached 65 nm level (2006).
Figure 2:
The promising field of nanotechnology applications. A new knowledge-based
industry in the making.
Nanotechnology refers to
tools, methods and fabrication of materials based on building blocks
(nanoparticles) at atomic and molecular scale of which the dimensions are
between 1 and 100 nanometer. Worldwide research in this technology is exploding
and nanotechnology is expected to affect nearly all industrial activities from
scratch resistant coatings to self-cleaning windows, new drugs and drug
delivery, catalysts for a cleaner environment, cheap solar energy conversion,
self-cleaning clothing, etc…
Figure 2
shows the main application domains for a technology that in 2015 may be worth
1.1 trillion dollars and be the technology producing the added value to our
knowledge economy.
Nanotechnology opens the door to a plethora of new, hitherto unknown
materials with new properties (strength, electrical and heat conduction, high
chemical reactivity, hydrophobic surfaces, etc.) This is the result of the fact
that chemical reactivity and quantum behaviour at nanometer scale differs
considerably from that of materials at macro scale.
Needless to
say this is not without potential hazards, as we do not yet know how these nano
particles will react with living tissues. Hence there is a great need for
parallel assessment of the technology while it is being developed, and for an
objective dialog between scientists and the public.
Again this
clearly shows the need for scientific and technological literacy for all
citizens, as our lives will become more and more dependent on technology.
Both
nanoelectronics and nanotechnology are technologies of non-living materials.
Biotechnology is based on living structures at nanometer scale such as viruses,
DNA strings, proteins, bacteria, normal and cancer cells, etc.
So it is
natural that Bio-Nano and ICT will meet at nanometer (nm) scale as is
illustrated in Figure 3.
We see a logarithmic scale in units of nanometer. Anorganic molecules
have dimensions of that order and bio molecules range between 10 to 10000 nm. A
chip is measured in cm but it contains billions of transistors with dimensions
between 10 and 100 nm. Such a transistor can act as a sensing or actuator
element that can interact with chemical and electric effects in living cells.
This means that ICT components can now electrically and chemically communicate
with nerves and neurons.
Figure
3: Nanoelectronics (ICT), nanotechnology and biotechnology meet each other at
nanometer scale. (Courtesy
US Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer Treatment)
A Belgian
example of a project focusing on these kind of developments is the
Neuron-on-Chip project
jointly executed by IMEC, VIB and K.U. Leuven for the development of interfaces
between neurons and nanoscale transistors, sensors and actuators on chips. The idea is to better understand the
impact of medical drugs on brain malfunctioning such as Alzheimer disease.
This is
illustrated in Figure 4. The top part shows the principle. The bottom part is a
photograph of the experimental chip covered with neurons.
The left
actuator on the chip sends chemical neurotransmitters to a neuron that fires as
a consequence. The electrical sensor senses the action potential of the firing
neuron and the chemical sensor on the right senses the neurotransmitter that was
sent off, while the rest of the chip takes care of the interpretation of the
signal and the wireless connection.
Figure 4: Interfacing neurons to a
chip for the study of the impact of drugs on Alzheimer disease (Courtesy IMEC,
VIB, K.U.Leuven)
Figure 3 also
shows symbolically how a nano particle can be designed to target and destroy
unwanted (cancer) cells. This can be done by inserting iron atoms inside the
nano particles and heating them by electromagnetic radiation when they are being
detected at the cell surface by molecular imaging.
Another
technique under development at the University of Michigan is illustrated in Fig.
5.
Figure 5:
Nano particles with the right chemical hooks enter selectively into cancer cells
and smuggle a drug payload inside to destroy the cells just like a Trojan horse.
(Courtesy J. Baker, University of Michigan.)
Figure 5
shows how a
nano particle decorated with chemical hooks for cancer cells binds to them and
tricks them into ingesting the nano particle, along with another nano particle
carrying a payload of anticancer drug. The particles are connected by DNA
strands, which can zip together different combinations of particles for
personalized treatments. These techniques have
great potential to become a substitute to chemotherapy thus avoiding all the
unpleasant side effects associated with it.
As shown in
the previous examples, the convergence of nanotechnology with bio and
ICT
will affect
all aspects of life such as medical, mobility, environmental protection, clean
water technology, cheap solar energy conversion, food and drug design, cancer
prevention and curing, lightweight but strong materials for cars (saving fuel…),
etc. This technology has the potential to deliver added value to the
industrialized world in order to maintain prosperity provided we start now and
do “real-time” assessment of the technologies concurrent to their development.
Outreach to the public and dialog with the public will be essential to avoid the
fear created by unrealistic pseudo science published by people like Ray
Kurtzweil, Eric Drexler and Hans Moravec.
Keeping the world sustainable
Creating ambient intelligence, better and affordable healthcare and
wellness are important challenges. But keeping the world sustainable for the
future will, without a doubt, be the greatest challenge of this
century.
At
the 2003 MIT forum, 100 top scientists had to decide on and order the top 10
problems for the next 50 years. In order of priority the 10 problems selected
were: Energy, Water, Food, Environment,
Poverty, Terrorism & War, Disease, Education, Democracy and Population.
By 2050 we will have to provide 4 billion more people with clean water,
food and energy to live as comfortable a life as we do today. But above all,
affordable energy remains the top priority as all other nine priorities depend
on its availability.
Solving
these issues will require thousands of scientists and engineers because not less
but more technology will be needed. But above all, global long-term political
leadership (with scientific literacy so lacking today) will be needed to provide
the means for engineers to explore and research possible
solutions.
How real this
issue is can be derived from Figure 6.
Figure 6:
Shows the affordable fossil fuel reserves and the 1998 demand scenario published
by Hoffert in Nature. The time to act is now…
This
illustration shows the evolution of affordable fossil fuel energy reserves as
well as the 1998 Hoffert estimate of world energy requirements whereby not even
the recent growing needs of China and India are taken into account. Clearly, by
the time our grandchildren retire, not much oil will be left, and coal will only
produce more greenhouse gases unless we find reliable ways to capture and store
CO2 emissions at the bottom of the oceans.
In any case,
these scenarios clearly show that in the 21st century, humanity faces
the end of two centuries of abundant fossil fuel energy (that is only two of the
nine thousand centuries of existence of humans!).
Obviously the
time to act is now and as Nobel Laureate R. Smalley states: “The problem, from the standpoint of kids,
that are 10 to 20 years old right now, is that they’ve got to solve this problem
by 2050 with technology that simply doesn’t exist right now. And they have the
responsibility to find it.”
Clearly the
solution in the end will have to come from renewable energy sources such as wind
and solar energy. It is known that the sun delivers daily more than enough
energy to sustain the world economy. However, solar energy conversion is not yet
economically viable and recent estimates show that another 20…30 years or
R&D investment will be necessary to reach a competitive level. Remarkably
enough, most likely the solar cells of the future will be polymer based and
their efficiency will be based on better conversion in billions of nano
particles. Nanotechnology is most likely to be the key to the solution. Solar
and wind energy availability does not necessarily follow the demand curve; hence
we must work on ways to store that energy and find a substitute for fossil fuel
as an energy carrier.
Hydrogen,
produced by solar, wind or nuclear energy is a possible candidate but its
storage and distribution are far from clear as hydrogen is a gas and its energy
density is much less than that of fossil fuels. In any case, it requires a
complete redesign of our energy infrastructure, so a worldwide political
agreement on our energy future is badly needed. It is the “Man on the Moon”
project of the 21st century although most politicians are apparently
busier with their next election than with planning a sustainable world. Again,
the urgent need for more scientific literacy, for politicians and journalists
presents itself.
After 2030 we will also have to
strive for an oil-less car in which fuel cells on hydrogen will put electrical
motors into action with only water as a side product. Weight can be reduced
considerably since all the operations will be electronically driven and new,
much lighter, materials based on nanotechnology will be stronger than steel is
today.
So, more than
ever, if we grab the chance, technology will be the essential ingredient to
create the added value to cope with the challenges of the 21st
century.
However we
must be aware that all of this will have to be made true in a world flattened by
ICT. Today
manufacturing of goods is moving rapidly East.
Keeping our
prosperity will depend on our ability to create the multidisciplinary
knowledge-based creativity needed to master the convergence of bio-nano and ICT
technology and to create the innovative products and services linked to the
values of our society. It is our only chance to prevent full delocalization of
our industry and to preserve our prosperity for future
generations.
Renaissance
engineers and scientific literacy
Science and technology are clearly the keys to maintain prosperity and
this creates an urgent need for social recognition of the technical and
scientific profession much in the same way as it is nowadays in Asian
countries.
This happens at a time when the number of engineering and science
students
in the US and Europe
is in decline while on the increase in China, India and Korea.
Studies
show that the
overall perception of science by the high school generation in the West is that
it is boring, unpractical, difficult and of no societal impact
whatsoever.
A recent
study by the National Science Board in the US arrived at the alarming conclusion
that “by 2010, if current trends
continue, over 90% of all physics scientists and engineers in the world will be
Asians working in Asia”.
So it is now
time to act and to motivate the younger generation to devote their talents to
the technologies for a sustainable 21st century. It is therefore
important to show that scientists and engineers are by no means “dull
middle-aged men in white coats, with no interest in society”.
The author
hopes that this article clearly shows the opposite! As we are evolving to
converging technologies, driven by the great societal challenges of the
21st century, we also need a new kind of scientist and engineer which
I will call Renaissance engineers, a profile that I’m sure will appeal to many
young people when we take time to explain the concept to
them.
Working on
converging technologies requires the Renaissance engineer to be a team player
rather than a lone nerd. He/she needs cross-disciplinary skills and must be
trained in creative system thinking.
He/she must
be driven by societal needs to create sense and simplicity products and
services, and by ethical consciousness and responsibility to protect safety,
security, privacy and health. The engineer of converging technology is becoming
a co-architect of society and hence must be trained in communication with human
and art sciences.
Perhaps research at our engineering schools should be merited more on its
societal impact than on the number of publications, full of Greek symbols and
hopefully read at least by the peer reviewers. This approach might lead us to
the creation of the Renaissance engineers needed for AmI system
design.
Many
such examples are emerging at top US universities. A
beautiful example is the interuniversity CITRIS project in California:
CITRIS is a living example of how society-driven multidisciplinary research can
be done in an academic open environment, something which is completely
orthogonal to the FWO - the National Fund for Scientific Research -
in Belgium with the continuing emphasis on individual disciplines or
faculty-oriented calls, which is becoming a thing of the past. If we want to be
competitive in the rapidly emerging world of converging technologies in the
interests of society, a lot more focus is needed on cross-disciplinary research
and inter-university cooperation, and a totally different reward system that
encourages faculties to cooperate rather than compete.
But there is
more. Society-driven technology is not only the domain of engineers and
scientists. Understanding technology or scientific literacy is even more urgent
for the politician, who has to make more and more rapid decisions that may have
huge consequences, and for journalists who have to bring objective scientific
information to citizens.
Scientific
literacy is also important for teachers so that they draw the attention of
younger generations to the societal impact of science and technology.
Most
politicians, journalists and teachers have been educated in human or economic
sciences (the alpha sciences). May I remark that nowadays we do have
psychology and sociology classes for engineers but we don’t teach technology to
psychologists, lawyers and sociologists, whereas the impact of technology on
society will be enormous. Also, bridging the gap with the art world is a true
challenge.
So, would it
not be logical – without starting to teach the laws of Newton or thermodynamics
– to start teaching the background, consequences, the feeling of technology to
human scientists? In this context an excellent example can be found in the
famous and very interesting course at U.C. Berkeley called “Physics for future
presidents”. In the human sciences
at U.C. Berkeley one can learn about physics – energy, nuclear energy,
nanotechnology, etc., in a very objective way. Thinking independently in
objective and quantitative terms about technology is fundamental for future
decision-makers at all levels in society. Why are these kind of initiatives
lacking in our Universities? The main
action point is putting interdisciplinary projects and programs into practice.
But given our current education policy, how can our universities be equipped and
rewarded for setting these up?
Call for action
When we want
to move forward, we have to stop thinking about scientists as “middle-aged men
in white coats”. However, we are faced with an industrial progress driven by a
shareholder system pushing for exponential growth in a consumption-oriented
society with a time perspective ranging from next quarter to next election.
Hence I want to conclude this article with a range of recommendations.
Recommendation 1: Opting for a shareholder-based society may be
beneficial in the immediate future but it does not favor attention to the key
long-term challenges of this century being the creation of a sustainable world
and attaining an acceptable level of prosperity for 9 billion people in 2050.
R&D in converging technologies must therefore be oriented towards this goal.
These
real challenges of the 21st century will dominate many other areas
which will most probably become luxury problems, such as games, cellular phones
and the like. Therefore research in converging technologies must be directed
towards the goal to solve these real challenges in a win-win fashion, because
they will give rise to a new economy. But this
requires political support, long-term vision (usually not a strong point with
politicians) and puts a lot of responsibility on politicians especially the
European Parliament, as these issues way exceed the resources of individual
Member States.
Progress in science is incremental but as the next step is built on what
is already available, there is a trend towards exponential growth as long as resources are available and no
laws of physics are limiting it.
However, convergence of technologies evolves slower than “exponentially”
expected, due to the need for- but the
lack of interdisciplinary activity as well as the scattering of research funding for the
different disciplines over different European departments and Member
States. Most scientists are deeply specialized and have little interest in
neighboring converging disciplines. Top down professional cooperation is lacking
when compared, for example, to the US National Nano technology Initiative
(NNI) and the
Japanese MEXT initiative. This
rough analysis automatically leads to the formulation of a second
recommandation.
Recommendation
2: Our future society urgently needs a funding
system that encourages interdisciplinary converging research including a certain
percentage for concurrent assessment of societal aspects. In any NNI
US initiative today, 3% of the
efforts is devoted to outreach to the public.
Inter-disciplinarity
is not encouraged by the actual merit system for
academics. Rather, the system tends to reward more incremental and
individual in-depth work within a discipline as opposed to work towards the
convergence of disciplines. More holistic society-driven research must be
funded. This requires a change of mindset in most universities and funding
agencies. Europe is late in
reacting to this. It produces great scientific papers, but little innovation:
this is the so-called European research paradox.
A European high-level expert group “Foresighting the New Technology Wave”
produced an excellent document on converging technologies entitled “Converging
Technologies for the European Knowledge Society (CTEKS)” . It contains 16 excellent recommendations
to cut across multiple disciplines to create a knowledge-based economy. However,
when analysing the strategy behind the European Commission’s 7th
R&D Framework Program, one does not find a framework to encourage multidisciplinary
work over the boundaries of disciplines that often belong to different
departments competing for money.
There is thus an urgent need to define a set of ‘common goals’, to focus
on them and avoid fragmentation. It is hard to create coherent programs in a
European Union where 95% of research funding to create the knowledge society is
still nationally funded and hence highly fragmented with a lot of duplication.
This is in sharp contrast with the Federal US NNIinitiative and the Japanese nanotech program.
Europe is great at producing white papers on the vices and virtues of
technology but in the meantime, it is losing control on a global scale in spite
of all the fuss about the Lisbon agreement (which in reality is just another
white paper).
Europe also produces excellent scientific papers but the fact is that 60% of patents on
converging technologies are coming from the US. Patents show the real stuff;
scientific papers are read by a few specialists and peer reviewers but their
impact on innovation and economy is rather small. But in the end, it is the
economy that makes the luxury of philosophy possible and ensures the prosperity
of society. This statement leads to recommendation
3.
Recommendation 3: Let us stop creating
more white papers and instead widely distribute the existing recommendations
over the whole scientific community (both human and exact sciences) and start
executing them. This is insufficiently done at
present.
Finally, in view of the urgent need for more scientists and engineers
capable of functioning in CTEKS one should urgently:
Recommendation
4: Create
and fund education and training of skilled people able to function in the
multidisciplinary world of converging technologies. Educate “renaissance”
engineers and scientists (including social sciences) able to communicate over
the boundaries of their area of specialization.
CONCLUSION
The 21st century confronts humanity with a number of huge
challenges that will require the convergence of emerging technologies. It will
be crucial for our western society to bundle our scientific and technological
knowledge and to build technical leadership in a quickly flattening world if we
want to keep our social system and prosperity alive.
Therefore we have to encourage young people to become renaissance type
engineers, scientists and technicians and to adapt our education and research
system to this major change towards a society-driven technology.
We must stimulate universities to become a “universitas” again by
encouraging cross-disciplinarity and by also introducing the significance of
science and technology in the alpha sciences as an integral part of human
culture. Universities must also be encouraged to take part in an objective
debate about the benefits and drawbacks of emerging technologies.
Funding
agencies should pay more attention to innovation and cross disciplinarity and
reward system thinking over the borders of disciplines.
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