• Question: how far do you think engineering will come in the next 50 years????

    Asked by Tom to Jamie, Kristen, Sheun, Simon, Will on 17 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: William Scott-Jackson

      William Scott-Jackson answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      That’s a very good question and one that isn’t easily answered in a small text box. I’ll provide a few predictions though.

      1. The pace at which computers are getting faster will slow down if not completely grind to a halt. So engineers will have to come up with a new architecture for computers. We may even crack quantum computing in that time.
      2. We will be using very different sources of energy to the ones we are are using now.
      3. We’ll be recycling more which will require very large amounts of engineering infrastructure.
      4. We’ll be infinitely more connected to our world and each other thanks to the Internet of Things.
      5. I don’t think we’ll have phones in the same way any more. They may be wrist mounted devices which can bend around your wrist. It’ll be crazy!

    • Photo: Simon Marchant

      Simon Marchant answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      I love questions like this, thinking about what technology we could have soon is really cool! I think that engineering will make huge advances in the next 50 years and totally change the way that we do things!

      To think about hospital and medical technology specifically, some engineers are already managing to make robotic arms that can be controlled by thought, so we’ll be able to replace lost limbs with better versions that look just like the originals! And making really small things is getting easier, so perhaps we’ll be able to diagnose and cure some things by releasing tiny little robots into our blood! And we could have hand-held scanners that can find lots of illnesses just from a quick check! Lots of people are working on making a computer model of everything that happens in a human body, so perhaps we willmbe able to model a whole person and see how drugs will affect you before you even get them!

      So many things could happen, and yiu could do so many things if you become an engineer in healthcare!

    • Photo: Sheun Oshinbolu

      Sheun Oshinbolu answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      That’s a very good question.
      1.I think technically computers will have advanced
      2. We would be at a point where renewable sources of energy is 3. New medicines and vaccines will have come out,
      4. We may have cured some diseases people are suffering from now but then have a whole new bag of diseases to deal with
      5. I think having touchscreens in mid-air would be awesome (I just watched Avengers recently 🙂 )

    • Photo: Jamie Johnston

      Jamie Johnston answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      I think the speed at which we will be able to manufacture will increase, and power consumption will dramatically reduce, the drive to make things cheaper will push the technology forwards I reckon.

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