The Trifecta – Strategic Priorities for a Modern Society (from an engineer’s perspective)

Sci-Tech Sci-Tech

I have always wondered how to solve the different challenges people face, and for me, that mostly means thinking about how best to help through innovations in technology. At times it feels like there are so many challenges that one could dedicate a lifetime, whether in time or money, to a single problem and still only manage to solve a few of them. To make the highest impact, my approach is to focus on innovations in the top three fields, which then serve as a foundation for many others. When there is a fire, you still need to put it out. You still need buckets of water and a good fire truck, but the greater impact for the future comes from building stronger foundations and fireproofing, from solving the problem at its core. For example, cleaning up littered beaches is important, and just as important is preventing future littering, whether by changing the sources of the litter or the habits of the people. At the core of it all, I believe technological innovations in three key fields, energy, education, and food, can be the most impactful across all other industries and social challenges. These form the Trifecta: strategic priorities for a modern society. In the following paragraphs I share some examples of how innovations in these fields can, directly and sometimes indirectly, solve many problems. Note that these are broad classifications, meant only as a starting reference.

By sharing this, by starting my blog, I hope to share my motivations and inspire others to take up similarly aligned initiatives. By myself I can only do so much, but collectively we have the power to do a lot more. It also becomes a commitment on my part, to work best towards this.

The Trifecta – Strategic Priorities for a Modern Society (from an engineer’s perspective): Energy. Education. Food.

The saying goes, “Shoot for the moon, if you miss you’ll land amongst the stars.” Though, don’t aim for the moon. I like to think, “Shoot for the stars! If you can’t make it, at least you might make it to the moon.” By working towards the biggest challenges, even if not completely successful, the effort put toward a larger goal is still greater than if one worked only toward smaller goals. So I aim big, thinking about how to maximize the impact of my work, and focus my efforts on innovations in the Trifecta.

Energy – Electricity, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and Resilience

The biggest limiter of a modern technological society is energy. An abundance of it helps everyone. Apart from direct implications, such as uninterrupted home power supply, it can also indirectly help solve other problems.

In some places, problems such as traffic, pollution, and unemployment can be attributed in part to high population density, which in turn calls for a lot of planning. With electricity, more sustainable and reliable transportation, electric cars, high-speed electric trains, more buses, and so on, can be built, reducing the need for people to concentrate in dense urban areas, since you can live further away and still commute every day over a larger distance. Decentralization of industries trends toward this as well, and for jobs that can’t be remote, transportation is the limiter.

At the same time, dense urban housing has its own electricity demands. Apartments consume significantly more electricity per unit of area than standalone housing, and a reliable power supply is what keeps essential systems, lifts chief among them, running in high-rises. Good electricity isn’t just about letting people spread out; it’s also what makes living densely, upward, possible in the first place.

On the topic of road quality, electric trucks and vehicles are much lighter. Not needing heavy trucks on the road can slow road deterioration. Overloading and poor trucking practices in particular wear down roads faster, leading to potholes.

Uninterrupted, power-resilient manufacturing hubs matter too. A key consideration for many partners and investors is a production facility that won’t be impacted by power outages, whether from insufficient supply or extreme weather events (which are also set to rise with climate change). A good power supply and uninterrupted operations are a marketable attribute of a production facility, helping attract investment, which in turn leads to more innovation.

Some industries, such as semiconductors, quite literally need uninterrupted power supply. The lack of it leads to massive inefficiencies and difficulty resuming operations.

An obvious reason improvements in the energy sector need to be prioritized right now is to combat climate change, with renewable energy and better energy storage methods helping toward this. Extreme weather events seem to be increasing, and storms, heavy rain, high winds, knocking out the power grid remains a significant challenge even in developed regions. Grid resilience hasn’t kept pace with how often these events now occur. We need to innovate in energy production to prevent outages and to be resilient.

I admit some of the indirect benefits mentioned here are, to an extent, wishful thinking. But I’d rather see it this way: if someone decides to take up a given problem as their focus, electricity shouldn’t be the limiting factor in doing so. The foundation of modern society, its backbone, is, quite simply, electricity.

Education

Improve education, and you can fix a lot more in society, from the core.

Speaking to the Indian education system, since that’s what I have experience with, there are things I felt were inadequate: more rational-thinking modules, identifying and encouraging original work, mastery of language and communication, philosophy, and something quite lacking, respect and appreciation for the arts. On the topic of art: people expect and want nice things in life, but few want to support artists. This extends to other fields too, such as architecture and city planning.

Lifelong learning and re-skilling centers, not teaching people to pass exams but teaching them the ability to learn and think laterally, is what would help a lot of people. In this rapidly changing modern world, we currently need more generalists than specialists.

AI will help improve technical education. What a school does, and can focus on doing better, is teaching people to be part of, and to fit into, a functioning human society: how to deal with life’s challenges, how to handle the “adulting” parts of life, personal health and fitness (inclusive of everyone), the things that matter in life, the things that damage society, and how to protect oneself. All of this needs to be taught in schools, and by parents at home too.

It’s a big world out there. There are people of so many different backgrounds, cultures, views, and ways of thinking. It’s beautiful, really, this aspect of life. How to interact well, and work together constructively, with people who think differently, is important too. Respect everyone.

These are some of my thoughts on education. I’ll explore how good education impacts things in other ways through future posts. I strongly believe that if you improve education, you create more capable people, people who will take up more of the work that needs doing, helping address other socio-economic issues as well. Of all professions, I admire and respect teachers the most.

Food (incl. health and medicine)

This broad bucket covers many things: food security, medicine, and health. The field of medicine is of vast significance and needs no elaboration here; it’s much bigger. I don’t mean to offend, but within the Trifecta I present food and good nutrition as the foundational heading, since it’s something that needs to be prioritized and currently isn’t. A lot of health issues stem from poor nutrition. If you can help improve food security and ensure good nutrition, for everyone, every single person, it leads to good health, good thinking, and a mind that’s able to think clearly, rather than one limited by poor nutrition. Convenient, healthy, and affordable food options available to everyone should be a foremost priority for society.

Good education on food science and nutrition helps everyone, as does education on medicine and how it works. For example, understanding the cause of an ailment: is it something the body ultimately recovers from on its own, or does it need external remedies? A painkiller (anti-inflammatory) reduces the body’s immune response to alleviate inflammation symptoms. But inflammation is important: it’s how the body locates and fights pathogens. Too much of it, though, can cause damage. So it’s a balancing act: trust in doctors, but also build the ability to make informed choices ourselves.

This post is a culmination of thoughts from the twenty revolutions of Earth around the sun that I’ve been part of so far. For each of these ideas I have many more thoughts and elaborations I could go on about endlessly, and I hope to share some of that through this blog. These are some of my motivations and passions: the things that work for me, the things I hope to share with others, in case a part of it helps someone adapt a little of it into their own life, for the better. I believe you shouldn’t limit yourself to one way of thinking. Be open to discovering, studying, and observing everything; find what fits you best, and slowly adapt it into your life. We’re all in this together.