A great book: Make, Think, Imagine, Engineering the Future of Civilization by John Browne

I read so many business books that rehash the same story over 280 pages that the almost-400 pages of John Browne‘s dense essay Make, Think, Imagine, Engineering the Future of Civilization felt like a breath of fresh air. It’s a broad program organized in ten chapters with short, evocative titles: Progress, Make, Think, Connect, Build, Energize, Move, Defend, Survive and Imagine. 

This book is about “progress,” a term that often makes us cringe when we think of environmental disasters, pervasive poverty, inequality, job precarity, or cyber insecurity, to name a few of the plights that our society has to deal with. Yet, are these sufficient reasons to anathemize progress and think that we should revert to some form of paradise lost? Of course not. 

Nothing can be achieved if we decide at the outset that we have failed...

Words like “progress,” “technology,” “innovation” are structurally enantiosemic, i.e. capable of saying one thing and its exact opposite. Just as the Greek word “dēmiourgós” (“demiurge” in English) referred to “God” as well as to the “devil,” many of our inventions are double-edged: Think of the Haber-Bosch process that created both cheap fertilizers and the poisonous gases that maimed tens of thousands of soldiers during the First World War, or of the drones that bring medicines to remote communities but also power horrendous assassinations. The Manhattan Project produced the first nuclear weapons but also ended up speeding the discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Browne’s book is a stark reminder that most engineered products can generate their own set of constructive or destructive derivatives. Yet the author maintains confidence in humanity, based on the conviction that “unintended consequences and intended abuses can almost always be counteracted or prevented.” He writes, “I remain an optimist because nothing can be achieved if we decide at the outset that we have failed.” More and better engineering is what progressing on progress requires. 

“Progress,” albeit the title of only the first section of the book, is the thread that leads us through the engineering history of the Western world, where “printing” has evolved from the transmission of knowledge to the making of things, including the development of complex microelectronic and microfluidic circuits, where monopolistic big data companies share eerie similarities with big oil, where optical and electron microscopes allow us forays into the infinitely small, and where common sense may invite us to bring AI down to earth and distance ourselves from a technological singularity that could irreversibly alter our civilization. At every page of the book, you can see that the author, formerly the CEO of BP and still involved in countless organizations and businesses, is a trained and passionate engineer who revels in the evocation of both popular and lesser-known innovations. Imagine the awe of an ordinary nineteen-century person watching Elisha Otis give a demo of his elevator. Listen to Tony Faddell describing the accelerating power of the open source movement in the 20th century, to the roboticists bent on building-up a truly proactive medicine, or to researchers exploring new approaches to photovoltaics in order to address the limitations of silicon cells or better ways to manage and store solar energy. 

Previous decades seem like ancient times only when we don’t dive into them...

Structured as a thematic stream of thought rather than an historical narrative, the book reads like a vast space where oldies rub shoulders with contemporaries because of their shared drive to create a better world. As much as we want to believe that technology moves fast, we are still awed by what the EDSAC accomplished in the early 1950’s or by Federico Faggin, the creator of the Intel 4004 that changed the course of computing. Previous decades seem like ancient times only when we don’t dive into them. Where would we be without Alan Turing? Where would we be without the early versions of the backpropagation procedure developed by Arthur Bryson and Henry Kelly now used for machine learning and artificial neural networks? As eager as we may be to boast about our own recent jump-curving exploits, we can’t help but venerate the geniuses behind ARPANET and the Worldwide Web who designed the very foundation of our digital habitat. Incidentally, many of us would not even exist if Margaret Hutchinson-Rousseau had not developed the deep-tank fermentation process that made Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin readily available to treat the wounded in the Allied forces.

Progress is not a linear, cumulative process...

Although most entrepreneurs dream of creating the smashing innovation that will blow people’s minds and generate gigantic financials returns overnight, innovation often results from the convergence of multiple domains (science, technology, manufacturing processes, raw materials, methodologies, societal and ideological factors), each evolving at its own distinct pace with its own unit of time. It’s only when these heterogeneous time-velocities intersect that we can witness something like the “Hockey stick graph” popularized by the climate specialists. After all, it took several decades for organic LEDs to become a commercial success! By the same token, however, even reaching the high point of a Hockey stick curve doesn’t stop progress, whose dynamics generate new needs and new potential curves. While it’s true that between 1909 to 1914, the convergence between the creation of automotive parts, manufacturing, work design and sociological forces helped cut the Ford Model T’s price in half, the automobile industry engaged on multiple other roads, triggered by different engineering advances such as, for example the Unimate robots operated by General Motors in 1961… And the very perception of the function of robots can also evolve: Instead of being a brute-force powering cheap and undifferentiated mass production, they might herald a new collaboration with humans by enabling on-demand customization driven by customers’ desires, according to Dieter Zetsche, the former Chairman of the Board of Daimler AG and head of Mercedes-Benz cars. Progress is not a linear, cumulative process. Nor is there pure rationality in its adoption: After assuming that trains were a thing of the past in a world dominated by automobiles, what swayed Japanese politicians to adopt the bullet train was not the prospect that cities would soon be crippled by traffic, but a nationalistic desire to showcase their post-war rebirth at the then-upcoming 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. 

No one wants to fly in an airplane that has only 95 per cent chance of staying in the air…

Familiarity with history challenges epoch-centric dogma, such as what Browne labels “the misguided Silicon Valley mantra, ‘move fast and break things.’” “When little to no thought is given to the impact that engineering has on society,” he adds, “it can cause great harm.” We dream of running fully autonomous vehicles as quickly as possible, but for the time being, it’s reassuring that Amnon Shashua, the founder of Mobileye (an Israeli company acquired by Intel in March 2017), is well aware that society will only accept automated systems that are safer than human drivers. “While the biggest and fastest innovations may capture our imagination,” Browne notes, “the product of engineering must, in the end, also be reliable and trustworthy—after all, no one wants to fly in an airplane that has only 95 per cent chance of staying in the air.” 

As confident as Browne may be that we must strive to build a better world, the book never turns into a “March of Intellect” manifesto for the 21st century or some kind of Whig-inspired historiography. While it’s clear that the author believes in enlightenment, he unambiguously keeps away from any teleological temptation. The book reads more like an essay on the significance of engineering. It’s also a reflection on the meaning of time, peppered now and then by personal experiences. That’s true when he visits the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC with his mother, an Auschwitz survivor, and sees the frightfully efficient IBM Hollerith D11 automatic tabulator, or when he recounts his first encounter with the energy industry as a small boy in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in Southern Iran where his father was working for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. From his home on the top floor of an old palace along the Grand Canal, he joyfully sees immense crowds taking selfies, an opportunity for him to remind us of the CMOS active pixel sensor, a masterpiece of miniaturization invented by Eric Fossum in 1993 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Just as the first illustrated travel book, Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, encouraged people to travel, “engineering encourages dreams to form and then casts them into reality.” Yes, this essay is very British: Not in a Thomas Macaulay style, though, but probably more in a John Ruskin manner. A pleasure to read!