• Question: what do you think engineering will be like in the future?

    Asked by MyaC on 28 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Sarah-Jane Potts

      Sarah-Jane Potts answered on 16 Mar 2021:

      With the rate that technology is improving it’s hard to know. However, many things are inspired by sci fi, if you look at old moovies, many of the technologies now exist. So if you look at current films, some of those ideas may become a reality. I hope that above all it will be sustainable and adapt to stop using up the earths resources and poluting the planet. We need to find more ways to reuse, reduce and recycle.

    • Photo: Lia Bucks

      Lia Bucks answered on 16 Mar 2021:

      I think that core engineering principles, like the way we go from an idea to reality or how we solve a problem, won’t change much in the future. Though new techniques and principles to help us do that might be developed. The big thing will be the kinds of technologies and materials engineers will be working with – technology has come a long way in the past 15-20 years and I think it will continue to do so. Robots on the streets? Longer and further space travel? New ways to power things that are more sustainable? Bridges that can be built in less than a day? Who knows what the future may hold!

    • Photo: Mia Richardson

      Mia Richardson answered on 17 Mar 2021:

      I think the nature of engineering means it will always be at the forefront of cutting-edge technology. It is definitely becoming a lot of more digital, everything is moving to electronic and online. More and more devices are getting connected to the internet- in 2020 the estimate of the number of things connected to the internet was 34 BILLION!! As a result, I think there’ll be lots more ‘smart’ technology (robots, electric devices communicating with each other) in all industries! These will all have to be designed, programmed, coded… so engineers will have to become even better with computers 🙂

    • Photo: Anna Garcia-Teruel

      Anna Garcia-Teruel answered on 22 Mar 2021: last edited 22 Mar 2021 2:14 pm

      That is a difficult question. With engineering you try to make the world a better place – making daily tasks easier, more efficient, cheaper and more sustainable and this is a never ending task, because you will always be able to do better, and there will always be new ideas to be implemented. So I believe in general terms engineering will keep fulfilling this task.
      Now compared to the past, we have much better and more capable computers, so a lot of things that could not be done or calculated before can be calculated now, and so technology is making us progress much faster also within engineering.
      I think that computer power will continue to increase – they are building faster machines capable of doing many more caculatios in much shorter time – and algorithms will also get better, so that we will be able to solve very complicated problems faster. Here Artificial Intelligence can play a big role, because the better the algorithms are, the more we can improve a lot of things, without having a complete understanding of the physics behind them. So overall I think engineering will be more computation focused. I think it will be more and more important to be able to code and programme things so that the finding of better designs for example will become more and more automated.

    • Photo: Emma Robertson

      Emma Robertson answered on 23 Mar 2021:

      I think as technology advances, engineering advances too – more engineering will be done on computers, maybe with the help of more artificial intelligence. Technology changes very quickly so it’s exciting to think about what engineering will be like in say 10-20 years time!

      However much technology advances, the world will always need engineers so it is a great career to look at.

    • Photo: Kiri Hatton

      Kiri Hatton answered on 24 Mar 2021:

      In my field, autonomous vehicles may become a big part of the future. There are lots of challenges to overcome though – the ethics of the algorithms, the investment needed in road maintenance to make sure that the road markings and signs are clear for the cameras etc.

      Additionally – climate change and the changes in traffic levels required to reduce carbon outputs etc need to be considered very soon.

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