Excerpt

How can human society have reached the moon, harnessed the unobservable mechanics of the atom, continued to build computers that become exponentially faster and cheaper each year, and yet have operated so poorly in establishing stable economies, reducing the incidence of conflict and disease, and discovering and manufacturing effective biomedical drugs? It is certainly not through lack of interest, resources, effort, and intelligence. 

The war on cancer, the pursuit of greater economic equality and financial stability, the creation of online safety and security, and the invention of new nontoxic and effective pharmacological drugs have absorbed astronomical sums of money into both research and development—and yet in so many cases they have foundered and failed through the misapplication of previously highly successful ideas of engineering and design to complex systems.  

There is an urgent need for novel concepts directed at achieving an evolutionary and emergent engineering, and it is our contention that they are likely to come from the domains of biological and social life—not from the deterministic world of designed mechanical artifacts.   

A History of Success and Failure: The Siren Song of the Grand Challenge

There are a handful of technology projects of such sheer audacity and scale that they have become bywords for human ambition, ingenuity, and impact. Included among these projects should certainly be numbered the Apollo Program, the Manhattan Project, CERN and the LHC, the Human Genome Project, the Panama Canal, and the Great Wall of China. Comparably impressive in scale and cost is the continued application of some version of Moore’s law to integrated circuit design.  

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