• Question: What do you think is going to become the biggest challenge for engineers in the future?

    Asked by mattress to Iulia, Katie, Mateusz, Ollie, Siobhan on 9 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 9 Mar 2017:

      I am tempted to say that nanoengineering is the next big field with a lot of unsolved problems. We still know very little about how to make very small (nanometre small) working mechanisms.

    • Photo: Iulia Motoc

      Iulia Motoc answered on 9 Mar 2017:

      I agree with Dmitry. Nanoengineering might be a very big challenge. Also, having a robot / machine express emotions might be a big challenge, as we do not understand how emotions “work.” But at the end of the day, we can never know for sure. A few years ago, there were saying that we have reached our maximum capacity of inventing new things, and we still come up with things.

    • Photo: Siobhan Duncan

      Siobhan Duncan answered on 13 Mar 2017:

      I think it’s going to be when Moor’s law runs out and we can’t rely on faster processors.

      Over the last 50+ years, every 18months the speed of our computers has doubled and the price has halved. This has been very cool and has allowed us to keep building fast and cheaper technologies.

      However this is starting to slow down a lot, as electronics have gotten so small, and need so much electricity (which means they get very hot, this is why your laptop might burn your legs if you are not careful) that we can no longer rely on faster hardware, but need to be more clever with the software that we write.

      Also it means that people need to come up with new ways to make things faster in hardware, than rely of the same sort of designs getting faster every 18 months 🙂

      If I haven’t explained this properly, don’t be afraid to ask me more.

      Siobhan

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