Bob delivered the keynote address at the Spring 2012 Cockrell School of Engineering Commencement ceremony Friday, May 18. Below is a transcript of his address.
Let's begin with a question: Are you an engineer? Well, I'm an engineer, and proud of it. There's no need to tell the other commencements going on around campus, but it's we engineers who make the world go round. Hurray for us!
By solving the world's problems through technological innovation, we engineers energize the virtuous circle of freedom and prosperity. And so I say to you today, with great enthusiasm: Engineers, commence!
Speaking of commencements, I love them. Why? Because we get what we celebrate. And what the world needs to celebrate is you. It's a good thing that you're here today. You should remember this day for the rest of your lives, especially your commencement speakers.
But you graduates, get this, commencements may be great occasions, but like weddings and funerals, they are not really for the benefit of their guests of honor. If you've ever been to one, and I've been to many, weddings are not really to celebrate the bride and groom; they are to gratify the proud parents, particularly the mother of the bride.
Funerals are certainly not held to delight the deceased.
And commencements, well, they are not really about you. Commencements are to celebrate the love, dedication and sacrifice of those who got you here. And for your loved ones who made it here today -- even if you argued with them this very morning -- how about joining me in thanking them, again, right now?
The degrees you are about to receive certify in writing that you are among the best graduating engineers in the world. So, you already know that to get very good at something, something that requires persistent attention and sustained effort, it has to be fun. It has to bring you the joy of mastery, a gratifying sense of accomplishment, and let's face it, smiles from your family and friends. Fun.
I'd like to skim over the standard package of commencement speech advice by simply saying that you should eat healthy, exercise regularly, use sunblock when outside, and only floss the teeth you want to keep. Many commencement speakers implore us to give back, but it's really none of their business whether and when we give back, and certainly not now -- that can wait until you have something. And the secret of happiness? All you really need to be happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
That done, I'd like to take the remaining two hours of my talk… to go over some of the ways in which you might likely have fun in your enthusiastic engineering careers over, say, the next 50 years.
I googled the National Academy of Engineering's list of what they call the Grand Challenges. To come up with these Grand Challenges, the National Science Foundation sponsored the NAE to gather 18 engineering geniuses, half of whom I know and the other half I worship. There are 14 NAE Grand Challenges and all of them offer engineers much to be enthusiastic about.
I don't know why 18 geniuses came up with only 14 challenges -- maybe they didn't have perfect attendance toward the end. Anyway, again, it's a great list for deciding how you are going to have fun saving the world in the coming decades. You can find all 14 of them in full on the Internet at engineeringchallenges.org.
So, to follow are the 14 Grand Challenges in brief and no particular order, with a few comments I cannot resist. I'll add a 15th at the end -- to scare the hell out of you, or better, to spur you to action. And in passing I'll predict the next big gadget category that some of you will help engineer -- after the iMac, iBook, iPod, iPhone, iPad … the iWhat?
Grand Challenge No. 1. Engineering the tools of discovery. Science and engineering are not as separate as their university silos would suggest. Scientists need engineered tools to gather new knowledge. Many of the best scientists engineer their own tools. Engineers need the discoveries of science, some of their own, to solve ever harder problems.
No. 2 and No. 3. Energy: Solar and Fusion. The way I see it, Earth is a large fission reactor, whose thermalized radioactive decay has for five billion years kept our planet from becoming a permanent snowball. We can harvest the energy of the Earth's natural fission reactor through what's called geothermal energy, or we can build artificial fission reactors, like the 104 providing 20 percent of U.S. electricity today. It will be very interesting to watch y'all engineer safer, cleaner, smaller, and cheaper fission reactors in the future.
Fusion energy, on the other hand, is both a more promising and more difficult engineering challenge. Ironically, a natural fusion reactor flies across the sky every day, taunting physicists everywhere, from 93 million miles away. Today, we can only harvest energy from that Sol fusion reactor by means of thermal and photovoltaic solar panels. Making solar energy economic, say cheaper than coal, is an ongoing engineering challenge. In coming decades, we will decide if we should, and see if we can, build artificial fusion reactors on Earth. Geothermal and solar energy harvesters are much lower density than building artificial fission and fusion reactors closer to our homes on the surface of Earth.
No. 4 and No. 5. Carbon and Nitrogen. Right now we seem to be putting too much carbon into Earth's atmosphere and taking too much nitrogen out. A popular engineering challenge is to expensively remove from the atmosphere and sequester carbon dioxide. I'd like to suggest y'all engineer ways to profitably harvest carbon dioxide, which is after all, a great plant food.
No. 6. Water. Millions of humans die each year because of a lack of clean water. We urgently need to engineer better ways to find, distribute, purify, and desalinate water. Abundant energy would help a lot in getting us the clean water we so desperately need.
No. 7. Urban Infrastructure. Humans are flocking to cities by the billions. Among our urban technologies that need improvement are those for transportation. A million people die each year in car accidents. Would somebody please engineer electric robot cars that drive themselves, so I don't have to own a car or ever again get a driver's license by standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles? Need a car? There should be an app for that.
No. 8. Medicines. Science is now learning enough about biology that we are beginning to engineer medicines that actually cure diseases instead of relying on trial-and-error drug experiments that deliver only marginal improvements in suffering and life expectancy. Personalized medicines and medical robots are among the next big things. Modern medical research universities, like the one we are planning here at UTAustin, should have as many engineers as biologists and doctors, and a few entrepreneurs while we're at it.
Let's remember that 30 years were added to our life spans during the 20th century, but only 5 of those 30 years were added by medicine. The other 25 years were added to our lives by what's called "public health." Let's be sure to engineer some public health, starting with today's emerging challenge, obesity. I should talk. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
No. 9. Reverse Engineering the Brain. I have used my brain to think of three great reasons to figure out how the brain works: (1) for fixing the many brains that are alas broken, (2) for enhancing our brains so that we can think superhumanly, and (3) for developing ways to make our computers more powerful by mimicking human brains. What fun it will be studying the brain to discover what it actually means to be human.
No. 10. Health Informatics.;The Internet has disrupted a growing series of industries, in a good way, using technologies, standards, and information infrastructure. Changed forever by the Internet, and still changing, are mail, telephone, television, books, music, shopping, advertising, politics, newspapers, journalism, … and dating. The next big three big industries ripe for disruption are energy, education (to which I'll return), and healthcare. Let's figure out how to get healthcare on the Internet.
No. 11 and No. 12. Securing cyberspace and preventing nuclear terror. All coins have a flip side, and all technologies have unintended consequences. We engineers have to remember to go back and clean up our messes.
No. 13. Enhancing virtual reality. I am not sure why NAE’s 18 geniuses put "enhancing virtual reality" on their short list of Engineering Grand Challenges. I hope not because they are dissatisfied with real reality. But this leads to my prediction of what -- after the iPod, iPhone, and iPad – what the next iWhat is going to be. Well, I've worn some early iWhats recently. I call them … iGlasses. Seeing through them one can escape into HD virtual reality, or more likely, enjoy augmented real reality, seeing clearly at night, for example, or getting help remembering names at parties. Mark my words. In a few years you'll all be wearing iGlasses in various designer colors. The interesting question is, what will be their killer app? I can’t wait to find out what you are going to come up with.
Last but not least, Grand Challenge No. 14. Personalized learning. Education is next up on the Internet's list of disruptions. I recently met the Stanford professor who put his artificial intelligence course up on the Internet and had more than 100,000 people register, and more than 20,000 complete his course and earn a certificate. That professor has left Stanford to join a startup that will soon offer all of Computer Science to the world through some variation of Internet courses. At my alma mater, MIT, a professor put his electronic circuits course up on the Internet and also got more than 100,000 students registered. There is a lot of engineering ahead on this, but our current schools, colleges, and universities had better watch out. By just building buildings, selling textbooks and raising tuitions, our beloved universities risk ending up like Polaroid and Kodak, irrelevant and then bankrupt, because they couldn't accept that cameras would be replaced by Internet phones without film.
Those are the 14 grand challenges of the National Academy of Engineering. I think you'll agree with me that it's going to be fun meeting them over your next 50 years of engineering.
It will also be fun adding to this list and finding ways of keeping you busy for the 50 years after that, and the next 50 after that. I couldn't be more enthusiastic.
Just for fun, let me add a 15th Engineering Grand Challenge: Asteroids. Some of you may remember – they were certainly before my time -- dinosaurs. It was an asteroid that 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs and most other species on Earth. More recently, this month, a bus-sized asteroid zipped unexpectedly between our Earth and Moon – a close call – at tens of thousand of miles per hour. It will be back.
NASA knows about thousands of asteroids that are large enough and close enough to threaten life on Earth. I am worried more about the asteroids NASA does not know about. If global warming has you worried, asteroids should scare the hell out of you. Or, this should look like the funest engineering problem not on Earth. I think we should learn how better to detect and deflect asteroids, probably using space robots. Who wouldn't want to work on that?
Well, a startup company just formed in Seattle – backed by Internet tycoons and former NASA engineers – to learn how to mine asteroids, which are chuck full of some of our most valuable elements. Capturing and mining asteroids sounds harder than merely detecting and deflecting them. The startup is called Planetary Resources. They're hiring. Today, they have 2,000 volunteers ready to mine asteroids. Wouldn't it be cool to join them?
Please, don't jump up now and run off to Seattle, or anywhere else where fun engineering challenges await you. Just wait a second, you still have to collect your degrees and thank your family and friends.
But, after that, enthusiastic engineers, commence!
