Re-engineering the world

Our human-manufactured world was designed and engineered during a time of abundantly cheap energy and materials. It gave us productivity, comfort, and confidence. Cars, for example, reinvented personal transport, but in time they also created shopping malls and eventually reshaped cities. Fossil fuels provided easy energy for heating and transport, but also feedstock for manufacturing plastics, textiles, adhesives, and chemicals.

But the world we designed for has already gone

When you sit in a meeting, travel across the country, or go to the shops, you’re part of an engineered world which now belongs to the past. Products, tools, transport, infrastructure, systems, energy, housing stock, jobs, cities, and even society — were designed for an era which has now vanished.

We no longer have abundantly cheap energy or materials. Climate change swept that world away.

We have spent a century emitting carbon into the atmosphere. The secondary effects and risks came into focus only gradually. We began to see that the externalities in the systems we’d created were in direct conflict with a sustainable future. They were beginning to unmake the planet too: the stable, persistent world we understood and relied upon has given way to one of change.

In short, the human layers we have built are no longer fit for purpose.

Can our world be radically re-engineered?

We live in an era of accelerating change, instability, and unpredictability. Therefore it must also be the era of us finally responding boldly: the invention of new solutions and technologies must be much faster, more flexible, and highly responsive.

We see hope. The first generation to grow up with connected devices has now come of age, and the result is a complete revolution in communication. Global population has doubled in the past 50 years, partly enabling this revolution with an abundance of eager adopters of new technology. Can this be mirrored elsewhere?

Opportunities everywhere

Every sector faces significant challenges. Meeting them will need energy plus ingenuity.

Energy and electricity

Electricity generation from fossil fuels is becoming less cost-competitive as the capital costs of renewables drop. However, the distributed and intermittent nature of renewable energy generation means distributed storage is necessary. We will need utility-scale storage, and to keep energy locally in domestic batteries and electric vehicles. Today’s electricity grids need to be more flexible and resilient. Do we need microgrids, better energy supply and more intelligent demand management? Or completely new forms of renewable energy?

Land use and food production

Water supplies are under significant pressure. Extreme weather, disease, and pests lead to crop losses. Yet fuel crops, meat production, carbon credit forestry, solar, and wind farms all increase competition for land. In the background is biodiversity loss, at a cost we won’t even understand until it’s too late.

Growing populations generally require increased food production. But land degradation, nutrient leaching, desertification, and salination are reducing the amount of available land. Fertilisers have filled the productivity gap in recent years, but they are mainly derived from fossil fuels and non-renewable resources. Regenerative agriculture must scale and thrive.

Housing, buildings, and heat

Heat pumps are starting to make inroads into fossil-fueled home heating but in the UK alone, 20m+ homes are under-insulated. The low building replacement rate in the UK and other countries means that most of these buildings will still be in use in 20 or more years. Alongside a critical need for lower carbon energy generation, these buildings need a massive programme of insulation retrofit.

Transport

The gradual electrification of everything is driving up demand: electric vehicles have grown market share in many countries, but EV charging infrastructure often lags. A bigger question is whether cars are the right tool for the job. The average car or van in England is parked for 95% of the time, and when they are driven they’re used for single-passenger journeys 65% of the time. There is an explosion of smaller “micromobility” vehicles including eBikes, electric scooters, pods, and neighbourhood EVs. They’re growing at a faster rate than cars because they are better suited to short and often urban journeys.

But, we are now starting to see negativity thrown at electric transport, mainly as vehicle manufacturers are unable to sell their EVs without making a huge loss per product. The bill of materials cost and legacy engineering currently prohibit this.

Beyond personal transport, electricity, and hydrogen will be key factors in heavier transport and shipping. But is this right? Why build a megafactory if the capital expense of this drives demand for shipping products to all corners of the globe in an unsustainable way?

A million more engineers

Today, using traditional creation, design, and engineering methods, we will need a huge number of makers, designers, scientists, engineers, and problem solvers to remake the engineered world for this new era that demands better.

And we need all of them to work with greatly increased productivity and impact.

Their challenge will be to work to crisis timelines because the need for action is so urgent. They’ll need to design systems in a much more integrated way because everything is now connected and interdependent.

Whilst building new systems, engineers will need to keep existing systems running until they can be transitioned smoothly and safely. We’ll need to change the engines while the plane is flying.

There are not enough engineers today to do this work — we will need millions more of them. But will traditional methods of training engineers close this gap?

UK engineering is ageing

Every year, the UK needs to add 124,000 engineers and technicians across the country, as well as another 79,000 roles that require a broad engineering skillset. The shortfall is 59,000 engineers every year, plus this gap will increase over time.

The Committee on Climate Change estimates that between 135,000 and 725,000 net new jobs could be created by 2030 in low-carbon sectors such as generating renewable energy, upgrading buildings and manufacturing electric vehicles. Other estimates put the skills gap in heat pump engineering at 24,000 by 2028, in offshore wind at 70,000 by 2030, and in nuclear at 173,000. The National Grid alone will need another 400,000 energy workers to achieve net zero.

However, engineering apprenticeships are disappearing, and engineering isn’t perceived as an industry with exciting career opportunities. Many left the workforce during the downsizing after the 2008 financial crisis and didn’t return. Moreover, in seeking opportunity, why work in hardware when software can be far more financially rewarding?

It gets worse though, because the average age of engineers in the UK is around 55, and they’ll retire quicker than we’re currently replacing them. This decade, 20% of the engineering workforce will retire.

The US needs 11 million engineers

There are similar workforce gaps in other developed world countries. Let’s take as an example the problem of electrifying the United States.

In 2020, Rewiring America estimated that electrifying America would require 25 million workers at its peak, up from the 1.8m current jobs in the US energy sector.

If we assume that half of these 23 million new jobs will need university-level training, the US would need 11.6 million additional STEM graduates. In 2019–20, the US education system only produced around 430,000 STEM graduates at Bachelor level and 172,000 at Masters and doctorate level. However, in 2019 only 28% of US STEM graduates were working in a STEM job, and the US already had several million STEM job vacancies that needed to be filled.

So in an ideal scenario in which every new STEM graduate was free to focus solely on electrification, it could take 40 years to train enough scientists and engineers to meet the need. But this need is only one part of the bigger picture: it would take hundreds of years to train the scientists and engineers needed to achieve climate transformation.

And we have more like 10–12 years to get the whole job finished.

A programme to electrify America with maximum effort would need the same intensity and focus as the Second World War or COVID mobilisations. Is this likely?

Ideas everywhere, massive impact

We need a faster and better way to create engineers. One that isn’t competing for talent with the existing system, but that is incremental and parallel to it. And we need to make all engineers more efficient and productive, regardless of their training. They will need vastly more powerful tools.

As we surpass 8 billion people on the planet, imagine the diversity of ideas that exist and are generated every day. Ideas are an infinite resource. Our collective intelligence is vast. However, to be applied at the speed required, it needs to be concentrated, shared, and reused in the most efficient way possible by the widest audience possible.

Imagine if we had tools which can augment and channel our collective intelligence to quickly and effectively engineer the new systems we need. Today’s standard engineering process is expensive, highly complex, and time-consuming — the underlying reason many hardware companies (especially hardware companies building sustainable products) are regularly failing.

For example, in its initial attempt to become sustainable, the automotive industry currently shoehorns batteries and EV tech into legacy ICE vehicle designs, leading to inefficient and costly products and bill of material costs that far exceed the price to a customer. Yet the capital expenditure and time of engineering a sustainable platform from scratch is too big a risk to automotive manufacturers. Leading to mass reduction of sustainable commitments throughout the industry. This must change.

No engineering graduate today wants to work on legacy and highly polluting products. Engineers like to question everything yet are unable to fully push the boundaries of innovation because of cost, and most of us have ideas we’d like to see created. The diversity of knowledge behind modernisation will push forward innovation.

What if the time from idea to manufacturable product becomes hours rather than years? What if the risk-averse behaviour of manufacturers became history due to highly efficient engineering?

We have begun to build the answer. The challenge Generative Engineering is tackling is big, we won’t make it alone, and we need a firm realisation from us all that change must happen.

Help us engineer a future that works

helloworld@generative.vision for a demo