To avoid tech catastrophe, the world will need more — not less — engineering

In July, con-men were discovered using bogus Facebook accounts to impersonate U.S. military personnel to entrap vulnerable women. It cost the victims their life savings and, in some cases, their lives.

This tragic example reminds us that useful, popular or essential engineered products can be used in unsafe ways that hurt unwitting users. This recent case involved communications systems, but almost any engineered product, be it an automobile, an airplane or an artificial intelligence algorithm, is vulnerable to abuse.

It is tempting to use such tragic stories to paint a bleak picture of our world. The merchants of doom who do this range from politicians who sow fear in order to gain power, to media outlets that know well that bad news sells better than good. Very often, they focus their anger on engineering, the human activity that has, in fact, done more than any other to improve lives throughout the world. At the moment when so much could be gained by trusting and empowering engineers to build a better future, the engineering mindset itself is under attack.

These critics predict that improving connectivity will create even greater opportunities for abusers to manipulate vulnerable people. We will soon be living in a state of total surveillance, naysayers warn. Books like “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” fuel a growing sense that governments and corporations will soon be able to see everything we read, watch and say online.

Others leap directly from isolated incidences where facial recognition technology has been used to infringe human rights to a world where snooping cameras that recognise our faces are everywhere and privacy is a distant memory.

Another powerful focus for grim speculation, indulged by many, including influential voices such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates and the late great physicist Stephen Hawking, is the supposedly inevitable moment when computers become more intelligent than we are and come to understand and judge our every action, and perhaps even decipher our innermost thoughts. If that happens, this line of reasoning goes, anyone who steps out of line will be cut off from crucial services and privileges, or simply eliminated by our algorithmic overlords. 

Others warn that terrorists will soon use gene-editing to make deadly viruses that can kill people tens of millions of people. Alongside that threat, misuse of antibiotics — the engineered drugs that have saved more lives than any other — is pitched as a fast approaching catastrophe that will threaten our very existence by creating “superbugs” resistant to all known pharmaceuticals. These bacteria could kill millions more and make hospitals into dangerous places to visit.

And if all this was not bad enough, climate change, resulting from the use of fossil fuels, could soon spiral out of control. Unchecked, crops will fail, low lying countries will be engulfed by the sea, a constant onslaught of refugees will disrupt daily life, and many will perish.

These are some truly hellish visions; their most disturbing feature is that they are not taken from science fiction. Any or all of them could actually become true. Climate change, for example, is nothing less than an existential threat.

But it’s important to remember that the visions I have outlined above describe only one possible future – and they differ from the doomsday prophecies that have been touted by fanatics and rabble-rousers throughout history in one critically important way. This time, we know how to solve many of today’s problems and how to avoid the new ones that could arise tomorrow.

The answer is not, as some of the technological naysayers would have it, to undertake extreme sacrifice and turn back the clock to an imaginary time when the world was simpler and healthier. That would mean welcoming back forgotten diseases, accepting that millions of children will die as babies and billions more will have to endure lives of grinding poverty. It would mean forgoing the ability to heat our homes and travel freely through our cities and around the world.

It could mean a return to the hardship of an average 65-hour working week, from today’s more comfortable average of 38 hours. With the help of computers and automation, most people now work fewer hours and are paid better for their time. Stopping engineering advances would also mean foregoing the extraordinary ways that our smartphones, tablets and laptops let us connect with friends, colleagues and loved ones, whenever we want and wherever they are on the planet. 

Trying to stop the forward march of engineering is not only pointless, it is wrong. It would mean stepping backwards into a cold, cruel world. Engineering gives us phenomenal power but creates both intended and unintended consequences. For example, I am confident that the fossil fuel industry did not intend to create climate change. Instead, it was an unintended consequence of the extraordinary spurt of world growth catalysed by coal, oil and gas. 

Engineering is the most effective tool we have for tackling the world’s most pressing challenges, whether they are triggered by human activity or not. The solution to the problems created by engineering is not less engineering. We must now embrace the very best qualities of engineering so we can develop solutions to these problems.

If you look around, you will see a world that is getting better all the time. It may not feel that way, but the figures do not lie. In my lifetime, I have seen the global population triple. But rather than everyone getting a smaller slice of the pie, overall wealth has grown by 20 times. While too large a share of this wealth is in the hands of a small minority, this must not overshadow the critical fact that the proportion of our world’s people living in extreme poverty has plummeted from 75 percent to less than 10 percent. What is more, the average person can expect to live for an extra 25 years compared to the average lifespan 70 years ago. And in the same timespan, the number of democratic nations has trebled and proportion of people who can read and write has risen from just one in three to nearly nine out of every ten. 

Now this is what I call progress. Every day, more people are surviving, getting an education, living without disease and gaining the freedom to choose how they want to live. This progress is not an inevitable or automatic consequence of history; it is all being driven by a single powerful force. That force is engineering. Across history, generation after generation of engineers have built the tools we need to shape our world and make lives better. 

But if engineers are to sustain this progress, we must not fear the products that they create. Vaccines, for example, are engineered products that have done more than almost anything else to control many diseases. But we can see today how irrational and unfounded fears are allowing measles to make a comeback. This is an illness that should have already been consigned to the history books. 

Claims that advanced artificial intelligence will soon be far more powerful than our human brains have no basis in fact. AI systems are certainly powerful and getting more sophisticated all the time, but nothing I have heard in conversations with several of the world’s best computer scientists makes me believe that the rise of ‘super-intelligent’ machines is in any way imminent. Fear, however, leads to knee-jerk responses and blanket bans on research and engineering. If we do not understand these tools and make sure we are at the forefront of their development, then we have no way of making sure they do not cause harm. If we delude ourselves and pretend that killer robots will never be built, we will not be able to devise ways to disable them and counter the threat they pose.

And if we stick our heads in the sand and try to ignore the fact that social media companies and government agencies are breaking ethical norms to harvest our personal data, we have no hope of designing sensible precautions and regulations. Nor will we be able to harness the many conveniences and benefits that so-called ‘big data’ can bring: better suggestions for what movie to view next; less congestion on city streets; earlier warning of terrorist activities; vastly improved medical care through more accurate diagnosis of illnesses; and even forecasts of the illnesses that may affect you in the future and suggestions of precautionary actions you could take against them.

To get the best out of engineering, and to limit its negative effects, we must not push it away from us like spoiled children who have been given too many toys. Instead, we must embrace it more tightly. Our lives are already utterly dependent on engineered systems, from the supply chains that keep the shelves of our grocery stores stocked, to the sewers that carry away our waste and the networks that deliver entertainment to our screens, and everything else in between. The precise workings of these systems may be very complicated but we should never believe that the ways they affect our lives are too complex to think about and discuss.  

Innovators and companies should be doing their utmost to engage with the people who use their products. They should do their best to understand our hopes, our fears and our weaknesses. As Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, so eloquently put it in his commencement address at Stanford University earlier this summer, they cannot – as is the practice today – claim credit for their products or systems without also accepting responsibility for their failure.

Regulations and laws will need to be modernised so that engineering teams and companies have an unremitting duty to stamp out ethical lapses and to align their moral compasses with the values of the societies they serve. They must never shirk from their duty of ensuring that their products and processes do not hurt the unwitting user or operator.

Engineers and tech executives alike also need constant and vivid reminders of what can go wrong. That is why Canadian professional engineers wear a ring made from a badly designed bridge that collapsed in a storm. For the same reason, I will never forget the day in 2005 when, as CEO of BP, I was told of the tragic explosion at our Texas City refinery; 15 people died and many were injured. I sincerely hope that the leaders of Facebook, Twitter and their like are deeply anguished when they reflect on the ways their platforms are misused to sow misinformation, manipulate communities and spread hatred. It takes constant vigilance to ensure that products and processes are safe and that we always learn from failures. Engineers the world over need to show that they “get this.” Only then will they regain society’s trust. 

When I graduated in 1969 from Cambridge University and was contemplating my future, my father’s advice was clear and simple. “Go and get a job,” he said. At the time I was tempted to pursue a career in research that would have taken me deeper into the mysteries of physics. I decided to become an engineer instead. It is a decision that I have never once regretted. I became an engineer to solve problems, not to make them. Throughout my career as an engineer and then as a businessman, that is what I have sought to do: apply engineering in a considerate way that improves lives.

During my time at BP, I learned very quickly that having a technical fix to a problem was only part of the answer. Equally important was gaining the trust and acceptance of people whose lives would be affected by that engineering. Now, in my role as chairman of the Crick Institute, a biomedical research hub in Europe, I am committed to making sure scientists’ work can make a difference in people’s lives. We welcome the public to our laboratories to learn about the advances we’re making, from gene editing to brain scans. We also welcome pharmaceutical companies, since it is mostly they, in the end, who will engineer the drugs that will help us all live longer, healthier and fuller lives.

When we approach engineering with a collaborative spirit, antibiotic resistance is not an existential threat. It is another problem to be solved. If governments truly understand big data and algorithms, they can apply them constructively, without stamping on our freedom. If we ensure that robots cannot make important decisions without first checking in with humans, they will not turn on us. Instead, we can use them to improve healthcare and public services.

From cheap solar power to batteries and carbon capture systems, we already have the engineered products and processes we need to stop the worst effects of climate change. Almost a quarter century ago, I was the first leader of a big oil firm to take action to mitigate the effect of burning hydrocarbons on the Earth’s climate. And I have been urging the need for even more concerted action ever since. We must now roll out our engineering at scale. 

If we get any of this wrong, engineering does indeed have the potential to be unsafe and cause a great deal of pain, suffering and unnecessary death. To avoid the worst, we must put the human back at the center of engineering and put engineering back at the center of society. If we can do this, engineers will continue, or even accelerate, the dramatic progress we have made so far.

John Browne’s new book, "Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilisation," was released in the U.S. on August 27.