Question: How much do you think engineering will develope in the next 100 years?

Simon Marchant answered on 23 Jun 2015:

Hi Jess! Thinking about how engineering will develop in future is actually really interesting, especially as it’s so linked with everything else – if you look back, the history of engineering is the history of technology, and that really influences the history of the whole world!

Anyway, most wise people would refuse to comment on the future because it never works out the way anyone predicts, but I’m not wise, so there you go. I think that engineering and technology will expand in every direction: our electronics and computers will become better and more important in our lives, and could start to come close to passing the Turing Test soon (this is a test that the legendary Alan Turing – that the film Imitation Game was about – thought of to tell human minds apart from computers if you couldn’t see them)! We’ll have to start using different materials to build things out of, including buildings, phones, and plastic things, as lots of the stuff we use to make stuff now is now quite rare. We’ll start to move to better ways of generating electricity like renewable energy (I may be optimistic here but stopping burning gas would save millions of lives so I choose to believe that it will happen) and maybe even fusion power (which certain scientists and engineers have been promising for at least 50 years, but still may not be in use in 100 years)! We’ll have to leave the planet at some point and it looks like in a few decades people will start exploring the solar system properly! In my favourite field, medical engineering, we’re closer and closer to being able to control machines with our minds, and read minds as well – which would be incredible and also terrifying! There are also people putting together a model of everything that happens in a human body, so we could make a computer model of everybody’s insides and work out which drugs will work best before we even give them! We’ve got surgical robots that are already as good as real surgeons and soon could get better! We’ve got loads of ways of gathering massive amounts of information off people and using it to make sure that they’re okay without ever visiting a GP! There future is so close, and it’s awesome.

… obviously, this is probably all wrong. So I would be interested to see how much I got wrong in 100 years!