Engineering the Future of Civilisation

A few Christmases ago, I went to Mexico on vacation – the sort of activity that seems like a distant memory.

A highlight of that trip was a visit to the ancient Mayan city of Palenque; a magnificent series of pyramids that rise up out of the southern Mexican jungle. During the first millennium AD, while much of Europe languished in the so-called ‘Dark Ages’, the Mayans were producing extraordinary works of art, developing accurate celestial calendars, and making hydraulic cement, which made their pyramids possible.

The last ancient Mayan city was defeated in the late 17th Century. European colonialists and their novel infections dealt the Mayan empire its final, lethal blow. But the once-mighty civilisation had already entered terminal decline many decades earlier.

Historians and archaeologists agree that key to the Mayans’ undoing was a failure to apply their formidable engineering prowess to solving the most pressing challenges of their day.

This meant that when the Central American climate changed and farming became harder, things started to unravel. Rather than innovating in basic areas like crop irrigation, the Mayans applied their engineering skills to waging war with rival cities and building lofty monuments to their gods. By the time the Spanish arrived with their gunpowder and their viruses, the Mayans were completely unable to resist. Their civilisation collapsed.

History does not repeat itself, but it does sometimes seem to rhyme.

Today, once again, the climate is changing and a global pandemic is exposing deep fragilities in the systems we rely upon.

We must, and we can, avoid the same fate that befell the Mayans centuries ago. I want to provide an antidote to the gloomy assessments which so often dominate the headlines. Some degree of concern is appropriate, but we must not submit to fatalism – because when we lose hope, we might as well give up.

This message at the core of my latest book Make, Think, Imagine. I started writing it as a book about engineering, but I realise now that it is really a book about civilisation – because engineering is the key that unlocks a better world.

What do I mean by ‘engineering’? I think of it as a head with two sets of eyes: one set looks to the fruits of scientific discovery, while the other looks to the needs of commerce and customers.

The brain in the middle integrates all that it sees and comes up with solutions: the tools and systems that we all use to understand and shape our worlds. That’s why the future of engineering and the future of civilisation are so inextricably linked.

With that in mind, I want to give you four ideas for how we can chart a better course into the future.

First, I want to remind people that hardware – not software – still determines the rate of human progress.

The current pandemic makes this clear. Smartphone apps for contact tracing and video conferencing have their roles to play, but ultimately it is vaccines, medicines and rapid, accurate test kits that will provide long-term solutions. These are all tangible engineered products, and their manufacture and mass distribution all depend on hardware. Countries that appear to have succeeded, like Germany, are those with the most developed industrial bases. They are economies built on hardware.

Software will certainly help us to develop solutions more efficiently, but it is not enough on its own. We cannot eat software and nor will it heal us, clothe us or provide us with shelter.

Consider ‘the cloud’, which we have all become even more dependent upon in recent weeks. It is one of the most misleading names in business. The cloud is in fact made up of physical servers and connections, all of which require energy.

A single Google search, for example, activates physical data centres in at least 6-8 locations across the globe.

The 6.6 billion YouTube views of the song ‘Despacito’ have consumed as much energy as 50,000 US homes do in a year. 

And in 2019, bitcoin mining not only depended on the physical infrastructure of the internet; it consumed as much energy as the Republic of Greece.

In other words, ‘the cloud’ simply means ‘someone else’s computer’.

This brings me to my second point: progress in physical engineering is almost always slower and more challenging than innovation in software.

The painful wait for a safe, effective vaccine against COVID-19 makes this point viscerally clear.

More generally, the big problem we face is not runaway ‘exponential’ progress, which some doom-mongers claim risks spiralling out of control. Rather, it is that progress is running too slowly.

All over the world, established cities are growing and new cities are taking shape. Providing our increasingly urban species with the connectivity, transportation, services, health and energy that everyone needs and deserves presents us with an immense and interconnected set of engineering challenges.

All these challenges are compounded by the looming reality of climate change. We need to provide people with more energy and better services than ever before, whilst simultaneously reducing our environmental footprint dramatically.

By assaulting our health so directly, the coronavirus pandemic lends extra urgency to this. People have seen the results of the virus. I am not so sure they want to see the results of climate change.

We already have the engineered products we need to accelerate the pace of change. We now need governments, policy makers and investors to create the conditions for these solutions to be deployed rapidly and at scale.

The pandemic could make this more difficult.

Even before COVID-19, globalisation and international collaboration were starting to unravel. Mounting hostility between the US and China, in particular the difficulty in agreeing a common and globalist approach to the development of 5G mobile technology, is just one example.

But now, this trend is likely to become more widespread and systemic. We see already that resilience, self-sufficiency and protecting the nation are increasingly more relevant than efficiency, productivity and internationalism.  

At best, a technological and geopolitical standoff will slow the speed and breadth of innovation. At worst, it could reverse the globalisation of engineered products. That could further impair our resilience to new threats, be they man-made or natural.

Globalisation and international collaboration rely on trust, which seems to me to be in shorter supply than at any time since the Bay of Pigs incident, when John F. Kennedy was President of the United States. This is my third point. The kind of bold, decisive action needed to head off global existential threats cannot happen without the trust of society at large.

Whether it is building new zero-carbon nuclear power stations, deploying new mobile internet systems, or even delivering a new vaccine to the global population, everything comes apart when society starts to doubt that things are being done without the needs and concerns of real people being heard.

I am on the Advisory Board of a company called Edelman, which conducts an annual Trust Barometer to measure the public’s trust in various professions and institutions.

Its latest update shows that during the pandemic, public trust has risen across the board, including in government leaders and, unsurprisingly, in scientists.

But history suggests that trust always rises during a crisis, as people look for leadership, before falling away rapidly.

I fear that this is particularly likely to happen in the UK once the dust settles, because very few of our institutions and public leaders have performed well during the crisis.

Political leaders have failed to adopt consistent strategies, leaving people confused and, more importantly, raising questions about whether we have unnecessarily suffered one of the worst infection rates and excess death tolls in the world.

Our scientific institutions have, for all their expertise, been unable to deliver, or were prevented from delivering widespread testing when it was required.

And some high profile business leaders have appeared to take unfair advantage of government support schemes.

Trust will be a crucial pillar on which recovery is built. We will only start to rekindle belief in progress when people can trust that science, engineering and public policy are designed, built and regulated with society’s needs in mind. Once that fire starts to burn again, our imagination is the only limit.

Imagination is the subject of my fourth and final point.

Most people ask me why I called my book Make, Think, Imagine. After all, it is commonly thought that engineering is boring, and that most engineers are non-creative technicians who simply crunch numbers.  

But it is engineering that allows us to imagine places we have never visited, times we have never lived, and things that have not yet been built. The things we make always trigger an explosion of ideas, including ideas about how to tackle the consequences of our innovations, and visions of how to make a brighter future.

Imagination is part of the job description for leaders everywhere. That is true today, as we start to look beyond the lockdowns and try to reinvigorate our fragile societies. And it is particularly true when it comes to tackling the existential threat posed by climate change. 

Almost a quarter of a century ago, I was the first leader of a big oil company to acknowledge the risk posed by climate change, and to pledge to do something about it.

Twenty five years later, an energy transition is, I think at last, happening. Thanks to the work of engineers and policymakers, renewable energy sources are now dramatically cheaper and more efficient than anyone might ever have imagined. Batteries and other energy storage technologies, and perhaps even carbon capture technologies, may also be on a similar trajectory.

It is too early to tell whether the coronavirus pandemic will hinder or accelerate these trends. But around the world, there is so much more to do. Each country, state and city must find its own set of solutions from the many options available. And this must be done while ensuring that economies continue to grow and prosper.

The Mayan civilisation collapsed because its leaders failed to move with the times. The present pandemic has shown that too many in society have come to take progress for granted. It is easy to forget that it takes constant work to maintain and advance civilisation.

We must never stop believing in our ability to innovate solutions. In spite of all the uncertainty and risk that it will inevitably bring, we must embrace the future wholeheartedly.

I have always believed that it is not enough to administer the advent of the inevitable. It is our job to imagine and then to write the book of tomorrow.