• Question: As a engineer what new machines and technology would you like to bring to the future?

    Asked by Blue M&M to Fran, Peppe, Greg, Petros, Pooja, Rumman on 5 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Greg Chance

      Greg Chance answered on 5 Nov 2017:

      I think this planet needs help in dealing with all the pollution that people cause and our ever increasing energy demands. I’m really passionate about minimising my carbon footprint, not driving very often, using my bike and buying locally produced food. But on a global scale engineers should be inventing clean energy sources (like wind turbines and solar panels) and thinking of ways we can clean the air, especially in cities to make sure people (you and me) stay healthy and happy.

      An example of how engineers are helping in these areas at the Bristol Robotics Lab is the Urine-tricity project (http://www.brl.ac.uk/researchthemes/bioenergyselfsustainable/urine-tricity.aspx) that turns human wee into electricity! It has the bonus of cleaning the water too and works by utilising naturally occurring bacteria so is environmentally friendly too – genius!

      I think robots and AI will play a part in our future too, helping out with chores as some already do like the dishwasher and washing machine, to driving us around and making the roads safer for us.

    • Photo: Petros Papapanagiotou

      Petros Papapanagiotou answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      One of my biggest goals as an engineer is to help people in their every day lives. Computers and Artificial Intelligence can help us by taking care of things that they are good at so that we can spend more time in the hard problems that we humans are good at. Like calculators are good at simple math so we can have them do the simple calculations while we do the hard math problems.

      Using computers and AI is quite hard for a lot of people. They are hard to understand and use and you need to study for years to do that. So for the future, I want to build machines and technology that help everybody use computers and AI more easily so that they can use all of the extra abilities!

    • Photo: Fran Zuch

      Fran Zuch answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      Hi

      I would like to see technology and machines used for good. There is a wonderful community here in the Westcountry called “Tech For Good” who are trying to get companies together that are doing exactly that. It is always amazing and inspiring what each one of them does, for example, there is a company in Bristol who are working on a vertical farming system (like boxes stacked on top of each other) that does not require soil and uses a lot less water than what is required today.
      I would like us to work on a solution for the plastic problem. We have a lot of smart people around the world and I feel the solution is out there somewhere.

    • Photo: Giuseppe Cotugno

      Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 20 Nov 2017:

      I wish I will be able to create robots which make people’s life easier at work. No heavy jobs like lifting objects all yourself, no repetitive jobs like in assembly chains, no dangerous jobs. A job has to be pleasant. For example, everyone should have access to facebook not only traditional office jobs at a desk, or take a coffee break any time not just at the end of a shift. I wish that tedious and repetitive tasks will be one day abolished leaving room for more human jobs: art, poetry, literature, science, engineering, theater, as it was used to be in the classical age when intellectual work was more valuable than technical work. As it is now, artistic jobs are underestimated in favour or non-creative technical jobs. A boring job should be done by a machine, not a human. A human should leverage on his/her feelings and creativity. If my inventions will make one day the concept of alienation a memory of the past (alienation is being too tired at the end of the day to do anything else than rest, and starting over the same the next day in a loop), then I would say that I achieved my target. The second target is not to make the transition traumatic for the employees and employers

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