What will the long term of the earth glance like? Almost everything in the planet evolves. Consequently, IEEE also need to evolve, not only to endure but to thrive.
How will people today make communities and interact with one yet another and with IEEE in the long run? How will knowledge be obtained? How will written content be curated, shared, and accessed? What challenges will affect the advancement of technical benchmarks? How must IEEE be arranged to be most impactful?
Even though no a person has a crystal ball, predictions can be built centered on proof and trends. To begin the conversation about these inquiries, I appointed the 2022 IEEE Ad Hoc Committee on IEEE in 2050. The committee chaired by IEEE Fellow Roger Fujii, is made to visualize situations looking out to the yr 2050 and past to get a world-wide perspective of what the environment may seem like and what probable futures may well signify for IEEE.
The committee explored plausible scenarios across IEEE’s vary of passions and scanned for motorists of improve within current and rising technological know-how fields. It also analyzed the function IEEE really should just take primarily based on the recognized prospective futures and mentioned following steps in IEEE’s big locations of concentration, together with conferences, education and learning, publications, requirements, membership, sustainability, and governance.
For case in point, visualize that in 2050, your “cognitive electronic twin” is regularly browsing the significant volumes of investigation papers and information saved throughout open up obtain repositories to find info instantly appropriate to your passions. It will also use its imaginative and innovative logic to recommend new principles and solutions for you. This system will be pushed by artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and digital fact created to support make you extra productive and innovative in your occupation. What is IEEE’s part in this new atmosphere?
Molding the IEEE of the future
As a world group, a considerable challenge of IEEE is that it supports a wide community. This also presents a terrific possibility to understand and pilot different types, services, merchandise, and options to meet up with the assorted set of members’ requires predicted for 2050 and beyond.
The technology era of 2050 will possible be intrigued in solving mission-primarily based problems these kinds of as climate transform, common access to overall health treatment, sustainable meals sources, and ubiquitous power era and transmission. Consequently, IEEE’s mission—to progress technologies for humanity—will even now be appropriate in the long run. Having said that, the way IEEE achieves its mission need to and will transform.
The future is multinodular and electronic. IEEE will reward from its standing and name as a dependable, neutral provider of content and information and facts. As a knowledge service provider, IEEE has an prospect to curate and deliver information to help its constituents and the general public in understanding the advantages and hazards involved with numerous technological know-how regions. Most importantly, IEEE can enable with the deep integration of artificial intelligence and digital reality into a large variety of each day purposes.
Adapting to an setting of consistent chaos and change is important shifting ahead. The ebb and move of geopolitical tensions are probably to carry on to increase—which will affect worldwide companies like ours. IEEE must become exceedingly nimble to deal with swift alterations in systems and interdisciplinary demands, and entice a broader viewers. IEEE will also have to have to fast reply to selected strategic adjustments and allocate funding for new approaches. IEEE’s governance composition will require to be streamlined to satisfy the needs of lots of foreseeable future situations that will call for the firm to empower community entities to make choices in just their location.
Believe in in IEEE must remain high if the organization is to retain relevance and remain a credible supply of details in the foreseeable future. Now is the time for the firm to be considerate and bold, and consider pitfalls. IEEE cannot be fearful to break silos. Some functions will will need to be terminated to make room for new ones. Solutions and initiatives should really be evaluated routinely, and choices need to be manufactured on a constant basis.
Sound frightening? Compounded by international warming, uneven demographic growth, and geopolitical problems, the long run likely is far more unsure than we recognize. But typically a crisis can be reworked into opportunity if we truthfully encounter the unexpected and turn into prepared for whatever lies in advance. Adhering to IEEE’s core principles—trust, expansion and nurturing, global local community creating, partnership, support to humanity, and integrity in action—will serve the firm nicely into the upcoming.
I sincerely thank Roger Fujii and the advertisement hoc committee associates for their attempts. Their perform will support IEEE in devising lengthy-time period strategies to put together for the long term, to adapt, and to change uncertainty into opportunity.
As I have shared, in an ever-shifting and unsure planet, IEEE—your expert home—is generally here for you, our customers, as well as for humanity, and for our shared foreseeable future. Soon after all, serving our customers well is our raison d’être.
By addressing the challenges and options that lie in advance of us, IEEE can stay a vibrant organization with relevance each now and perfectly into 2050. If IEEE stays genuine to its central values—fostering technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity—I’m specific that the organization’s future will be pretty dazzling in truth.
It has been my honor and privilege to get the job done with and for you this 12 months as IEEE president and CEO.
—K.J. RAY LIU
IEEE president and CEO
Please share your views with me at [email protected].
This report seems in the December 2022 print challenge as “Looking to 2050 and Past.”
