We are delighted to celebrate the 50th year of publication of the NAE’s flagship quarterly with this special issue featuring 50 essays looking forward to the next 50 years of innovation in engineering.

From its early days as a 4-page member newsletter, The Bridge has evolved to a thematic ...

At a lunch table during the 2019 NAE annual meeting in Washington, we joined Editor in Chief Ron Latanision, Managing Editor Cameron Fletcher, and NAE Director of Programs Guru Madhavan in a conversation about the upcoming 50th anniversary of the publication of The Bridge. They were considering a ...

In theory there is no difference between theory
and practice, while in practice there is.^[1]

The intention to “do good” is not always realized in the engineering of artifacts, processes, and systems. Innovations have led to many improvements in health, security, and quality of life, ...

Keynote

Chemistry, physics, and biology took turns shaping the frontiers of industrial development from the mid-19th century onward, but this century’s future belongs squarely to engineering.

This is an era of unprecedented convergence across multiple fields, propelled by breakthroughs in ...

Fifty years seems a very long time in the future for most industries. Not so in buildings and real estate; built structures routinely last decades if not hundreds of years, as long as they are economically competitive. Any discussion of the 50-year future has to consider existing stock as well as ...

Mark Twain is reputed to have said that history does not repeat itself but it often rhymes. Such is likely to be the relationship of commercial airline travel and commercial spaceline travel.

Advances in space travel are also likely to be a microcosm of whatever advances occur in engineering as an ...

In the grips of a global pandemic that knocked everyone off their feet, what can be learned about responding to the growing threat of climate change?

Parallels between the Covid-19 Pandemic and Climate Change

Scientific experts had been warning that another global pandemic was a virtual certainty ...

The World Wide Web has evolved into a complex mechanism for building dynamic applications that are used all over the globe for commerce, education, social networking, entertainment, and information sharing. Innovations to create the roadmap for future functions—immersive environments, ...

In the proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth summer workshop on artificial intelligence (AI)—the first recorded use of the words artificial intelligence—the authors made clear in the second sentence that they believed machines could simulate any aspect of human intelligence. That remains the ...

The world and engineering were simpler half a century ago when The Bridge published its first edition, just a few years after the founding of the National Academy of Engineering. The world was less globalized, less connected; only a few countries competed for global economic preeminence. All this ...

Now more than ever it is critically important for engineering graduates to be prepared to evaluate the consequences of the technologies they invent and scale.

In the past the impacts of new technologies—from nuclear power to genetic engineering—emerged over decades, and government ...

Human history is inextricably linked with infectious diseases. Smallpox and plague pandemics and epidemics have afflicted humans since antiquity. As recently as the 19th century, roughly one in 100 people living in New York City died of tuberculosis.

To an inhabitant of the 19th century, the early ...

In fall 2017 ecommerce and cloud computing giant Amazon announced that it was going to build a second US headquarters and cities could compete for the 50,000 jobs that would accompany “HQ2.” The company received nearly 240 proposals.

While most leaned heavily on tax incentives, ...

Virtual reality (VR) can be defined as the spectrum of technologies that enable a computer-mediated reality, ranging from an enhanced real world (augmented reality) to completely digital worlds. Over the coming decades VR will capitalize on the convergence of 21st century technologies and ...

I have spent over 50 years as an engineer, technologist, and business leader committed to innovation. Innovation has been, is, and always will be the leading edge of economic, social, educational, and governmental success.

But we’re holding innovation back. Not because, as conventional ...

During the covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020, I considered what fashion might look like from the consumer’s perspective in 5 years.^[1] The “new normal” is changing the way people see the world, and increasing understanding of the role of fashion and clothing in the connected, ...

This year marked the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the laser. Few optical or electronic devices have more significantly and directly impacted the quality of life worldwide and, not surprisingly, the NAE designated the laser as one of the 20 foremost engineering achievements of the 20th ...

I am a climate scientist highly motivated to find the best and fastest route to decarbonizing energy. As with many of my colleagues, I have felt an obligation to engage directly with the public on the issue of anthropogenic climate change. Collectively, we have become adept at presenting the ...

The past 50 years have arguably been defined by economics and the neoliberal agenda, marked by the rise of economic reasoning, with its emphasis on a free market ideology (Applebaum 2019). The focus on markets and a diminished role of government have failed to deliver on the promise of widespread ...

We are approaching the end of 2020, 75 years removed from a horrific world war that ended with the introduction of nuclear weapons, only to find ourselves in the grip of a fearsome pandemic and shocked by near revolutionary crises of racial conflict. At the same time, as engineers, it is our ...

As the world reels from the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, growing climate instabilities (including the worst forest fires in California’s and Colorado’s history, as well as unusually numerous hurricanes), and increasing distrust among the world’s nations, questions about ...

Quantum computing emerged as a research area in the late 20th century yet has only recently experienced a dramatic rise in press coverage and corresponding popularity. While some of this is inevitably rooted more in hype than science, a look into the future suggests that quantum computers do, in ...

The 2000 presidential election forever changed voting in the United States. In that election Florida used a paper ballot that left voters uncertain about their selections after they cast their ballot. Analysis of the paper ballots showed that the voters were right to be uncertain. The entire nation ...

The consciousness with which science is pursued plays a critical role in shaping scientific worldviews, the fundamental questions asked, and the technologies created and their ultimate impacts on society.

My childhood exposure, while growing up in the rural landscapes of -Mississippi, to ...

What might the US engineering community look like in 50 years? As an African American woman I belong to an underrepresented group in this community. My story may provide some clues on how to ensure a robust engineering pipeline.

Born in Selma and raised in Detroit, I come from a working-class ...

Engineering education should be reimagined to create a new generation of technical leaders prepared to dream, invent, and steward the future.

What Do I Mean by a Technical Leader?

I mean a leader like Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar, who with his colleagues leveraged the intersection of ...

Creating a more peaceful world is an aspiration shared by generations. Converting aspiration to achievement has been elusive. Creating peace is a wicked problem with no universally shared definition of success.

Peace engineering focuses on incremental, realistic, and compounding progress toward ...

In 1970 just over 30 million metric tons of plastics were produced globally for use; now that number stands at 359 million metric tons (Geyer et al. 2017^[1]; PlasticsEurope 2019). As of 2017, a cumulative 8.3 billion metric tons of plastics had been produced.

Plastics are unquestionably useful. ...

Over 4 million people are admitted to hospitals annually with a diagnosis of acute coronary syndrome (ACS), which includes unstable angina and acute heart attack. The three most common underlying mechanisms for ACS are plaque rupture (40–60 percent), plaque erosion (40–60 percent), and ...

Access to safe and reliable drinking water is a basic human right, yet over 2.2 billion people do not have it (WHO/UNICEF 2017). A similar number live in countries experiencing water stress, which is expected to be exacerbated by an increase in global water demand—20–30 percent by ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is more than 2000 years in the making, dating back to the ancient Greeks. To protect his island from pirates, it is said that the first king of Crete, Minos, received an unusual gift from Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention and blacksmithing: a bronze robot known as ...

Predicting the future using technical standards seems counterintuitive, but examining their history indicates otherwise. Six successions of technical references/standards—symbols, measurements, designs, similarity, compatibility, and adaptability (figure 1)—are based on general set ...

In 1970 silicon solar cells were used for powering satellites but were too expensive for terrestrial applications. Now they are the fastest-growing source of bulk electricity in many locations, accounting for an impressive 43 percent of worldwide net electricity-generating capacity expansion in ...

To appreciate the future impact of additive manufacturing not only on industry but on economies and their constituents, it is important to have some perspective on the scope of manufacturing, including the impacts and disruption of digital technologies over the past decade.

Economic Scope of ...

There is a quotation about predicting the future attributed to Alan Kay, a pioneer in computer science. “The best way to predict the future,” he said, “is to invent it.”

Of course, we engineers do often invent the future, but sometimes not the futures that we had intended. ...

In 1973 the German philosopher Hans Jonas posed the central ethical test for modern technological society. He observed that previously the “good and evil about which action had to care lay close to the act, either in the praxis itself or in its immediate reach,” whereas a new ...

In The Signal and the Noise, the noted statistical analyst Nate Silver (2012) examined forecasts in many categories and found that most demonstrate little or no skill and have made little or no progress in accuracy over the decades. The lone exception he found was weather forecasting. Before ...

As engineering strives to better people’s lives, human-centered technologies—enabled by converging engineering advances in sensing, computing, machine learning, data communication—will draw on machine intelligence^[1] (MI) to help understand, support, and enhance the human ...

“A victory small enough to be organized is too small to be decisive,” wrote Eliot Janeway (1951, p. 16) in his history of the mobilization of American industry during World War II. A great victory required an upwelling of energy from all parts of society. That energy could not be ...

As a media scholar interested in technology’s relationship to society, I think about the ethical challenges brought about by computing and artificial intelligence (AI) tools in shaping global media culture. Three fundamental societal challenges have emerged from the use of AI.

Technological ...

Every new year prompts past reflections and new expectations, but some feel more significant than others. As the year 2000 arrived, the world ­anxiously waited to see whether a seamless conversion of global data systems from two- to four-digit representation would avert a “Y2K” ...

When thinking about how technologies will impact life decades from now, the past holds many lessons and warnings. I have come to this realization after spending several years examining old inventions for my book The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another (Ramirez 2020).

...

According to the World Green Building Council (WGBC 2017), building and construction account for 39 percent of annual global carbon emissions. The heating, lighting, and cooling of buildings accounts for 28 percent of this total and the remaining 11 percent comes from what is known as embodied ...

It would be absurd today if anyone attempted to launch a product using chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Yet less than 50 years ago, the use of CFCs was entrenched in industry standards for numerous products, such as aerosols and refrigerants. With the 1987 Montreal Protocol, 197 countries agreed to ...

Transportation is a large and diverse sector that encompasses road (passenger and freight vehicles), aviation, marine, and rail transport. In 2018 this sector accounted for nearly a quarter of global anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions,^[1] so efforts to decarbonize it are critical to achieving ...

Autonomous vehicles are still “baffled” by unpredictable human actions such as wrong-way driving, emergency vehicles, and human-guided traffic diversions. Yet this unpredictability gives people an edge in unknown or dangerous situations. Therefore remote supervision by a human and ...

Space travel is the next necessary step in human evolution. Ensuring that humans can live on multiple planets and be out among the stars, exploring the universe, is both key to human survival and a magnificent source of inspiration.

But current single-use rockets make getting to orbit ...

The prehistory and protohistory of humanity are divided into three ages in terms of materials: the Stone Age (~3.4 million years, until 8700–2000 BC), based on raw materials from nature; the Bronze Age (3500–300 BC), based on human-made copper (alloyed with 12 wt% tin); and the Iron Age ...

By 2050, the global population is predicted to reach 9.7 billion. If consumption practices do not change and food continues to be wasted at alarming rates, farmers around the world will need to increase production 25–100 percent to meet the associated increase in food demand (Hunter et al. ...

About 5 years ago the number of mobile phone accounts in the world exceeded the total human population (ITU 2019). Nomadic pastoralists in East Africa and tribal communities in South Asia make fluent use of cellphones, even where life is otherwise preindustrial, even preagrarian. As measured by the ...

Over the past few decades information technology (IT) has suffused every corner of society and reshaped the way people live, communicate, work, and entertain themselves. The next 50 years are likely to yield another generational change in electronics, and corresponding changes in people’s ...

In stark contrast to progress on almost all the UN Sustainable Development Goals, clean water supply and safety issues are worsening globally, threatened by groundwater depletion, shrinking glacial melt, major rivers running dry, increasing salinity of soils and groundwater, more dangerous and ...

Fifty years feels almost unimaginably long in internet time. Fifty years ago, the ARPANET was barely a year old; Ray Tomlinson had not yet sent the first email, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn had not yet published their ­seminal paper on the protocol that would become TCP/IP, Tim Berners-Lee had ...