Syndemic Solutions
The issues humans face are interconnected and accelerated by technology. But engineers can also harness technology to resolve them.
By Deborah Jackson
In his keynote address at ASEE’s 2021 virtual conference, University of Maryland President Darryl Pines described the year 2020 as “a watershed moment for humanity.” The former engineering school dean gave name to the calamity of events we have collectively experienced over the past eighteen months—a worldwide pandemic, social injustice, political uncertainty, and the devastation of climate change. This is a syndemic, he explained: “the combination of multiple epidemics/pandemics happening at the same time.”
We live in a time of hyper-global interconnectivity, enabled by multiple modes such as air travel, the internet and social media, and international supply chains. According to Pines, these connections accelerate both the causes and the effects of our current ills. But once we begin to see the interconnections between these seemingly unrelated events, he emphasized, we can begin the hard work of finding solutions.
For example, air travel has exacerbated the pandemic, allowing it to spread internationally within weeks compared to the year that the 1918 influenza took to go global. The internet has both enhanced connectivity and shortened time frames for information dissemination, which is intensifying political unrest and exposing social inequality worldwide.
Even climate change is a product of rapidly accelerating technological advancements powered by fossil fuels. Many of our modern-day conveniences (cars, airplanes, appliances) are enabled by these energy sources, with a cumulative impact on the climate.
Typically, geologic epochs last more than 3 million years and are named based on their impacts in hindsight. However, the period of time in which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment has already been given a working name: Anthropocene. Its emergence less than 200 years ago may seem slow to us humans, but on the geologic time scale, this period of human-dominated activity is greatly accelerated.
The connection between our technology and its effects creates a dilemma and makes the Anthropocene effects difficult to reverse. Therefore, humanity’s biggest challenge will be to find ways to replace our engineered systems with solutions that minimize negative impact.
The world needs engineers more than ever, Pines stressed in his talk, “Grand Challenges Demand Fearless Ideas.” Because we solve problems for people and society, our expertise and creativity will be required. While air travel hastened the pandemic’s spread, engineering principles undergirding the field of synthetic biology accelerated the development and deployment of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in a brief year and a half instead of the decades required to develop vaccines for polio, measles, mumps, hepatitis B, and Ebola.
Advancements in big data, artificial intelligence, and computational capability also offer new systems engineering tools capable of addressing the complexities of these issues. With them, Pines explained, engineers can take on challenges such as improving the nation’s infrastructure, preparing for the next pandemic, setting national research priorities, and transforming engineering education.
I am cautiously optimistic that we will not continue using the same approaches that got us to this point but instead will better account for the complex interconnections in designing new engineered systems. Although these are daunting tasks, surely we can engineer solutions that aren’t worse than the problems.
No doubt we can also define measurable metrics to track our progress, giving us a goal toward which we can collectively strive. The current pandemic demonstrates that widespread adoption of new technologies often presents a challenge. But real-time access to relevant metrics could be a strategic game changer. For instance, international statistics site Worldometer has helped the public track and respond to changing COVID statistics on global, regional, national, and local scales. It could similarly provide other metrics, such as for climate change, to enhance large-scale public cooperation.
I have long been familiar with the geologic definition of watershed as “an area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas.” President Pines used the word as a temporal metaphor to highlight the simultaneous manifestation of events and the overwhelming challenges they present for humanity on a global scale.
However, he ended with a bold assurance: “Society adapts, always, to watershed moments, and engineers lead the way.”
Deborah Jackson is a program manager in the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Engineering. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily represent those of NSF or of the US government.