Guru Madhavan

🤖 WHEN AI DIES ⚰️

✨ In my latest column for the National Academy of Engineering’s Bridge magazine, prompted by the recent events around TikTok, I explore how we’ve built AI into a dazzling yet deficient genius, machines of vast memory but no legacy. 🚨

🔗 Read here: www.nae.edu/340912/Invis...

🙏🏼 Tremendously honored—and honoured—to be elected to the Royal Academy of Engineering. #RAEngFellows

www.nae.edu/340727/Guru-...

⚖️ We don’t need another umbrella term. We need sharper language that makes responsibility visible. Technical work has always carried moral weight. Our words should help us name it, reckon with it, and act accordingly, as the ancients knew it.

📊 Teleconferencing tools, streaming platforms, and chip makers all trade under the same “technology” banner despite vastly different models. Convenient shorthand, yes, but it blurs risks and erases intent. What begins as casual speech hardens into billion-dollar policy and trillion-dollar markets.

💡TECHNOLOGY. What do we really mean when we use that word?

☢️ In a Financial Times column, I argue “technology” now covers everything from nuclear warheads to noise cancelling headphones, stents to social media, and hair dryers to the Hoover Dam.

(💲) www.ft.com/content/a48c...
(📄) PDF images 👇

Introducing EngineerTeen

We're EngineerTeen, a new program from the National Academy of Engineering and a sibling site to @engineergirlnae.bsky.social which builds on that community to help youth chart their path to become the technical leaders of tomorrow. We're excited to get started! Visit us at engineerteen.org 🙂

Why engineers are diving into deeper questions, how ingenuity should meet responsibility, what #engineering has taught Roma about life and Baked Alaska, and my own near-misses—how I almost took up mocha and monkhood.

👏🏽 Produced by Saskia Cookson, Jack Howson Peanut & Crumb

Guru & Roma reflect | Create the Future

🌍 Engineering is peer-reviewed by reality.

🎙️In the season finale of the @qeprize.bsky.social "Create the Future" #podcast, my cohost and fellow engineer Roma Agrawal and I roam through all sorts of topics.

🎧 Listen here: shows.acast.com/createthefut...

Together, we’ve mapped how #engineering makes life possible, livable, and meaningful.

👏🏽 Produced by Tess Davidson, Eva Krysiak, Jack Howson, Peanut & Crumb.

👏🏽 Hayaatun Sillem, Jonathan Narbett, Jane Sutton, Dr. Sarah Rhodes, Suzanne Kanca.

🌟🌟Coming soon: Season Finale ! 🌟🌟

🚀Charlie Bolden and Dava Newman pulled us outward—to space, to possibility, and to purpose (qeprize.org/podcasts/the...).

☕Tonya Kuhl and Jonathan Morris reminded us that coffee is really about connection (qeprize.org/podcasts/the...).

🗳️ Charles Phelps and Eswaran Subrahmanian showed how democracy depends on what most voters never see (qeprize.org/podcasts/the...).

♿Ashley Shew and Rory Cooper flipped our assumptions about disability and design (qeprize.org/podcasts/eng...).

🔥Luke Bisby and Jose Torero unpacked how we’ll face fire, now and ahead (qeprize.org/podcasts/the...).

🚇Pam Elardo and Andy Russell took us underground to meet the overlooked engines of public health (qeprize.org/podcasts/the...).

🎧 Fire. Space. Coffee. Disability. Elections. Sanitation.
Six conversations. Six dimensions. All engineering.

From the everyday to the extraordinary, I’ve had the fortune to explore how #engineering runs through everything—seen and unseen—for the @qeprize.bsky.social podcast “Create the Future.”

🌀 Garba raas dancers mastered what the best teams still chase: synchrony with spontaneity, precision with presence, and unity without uniformity, all achieved without a single ping from Teams or Slack.

🌏 International Museum Day 2025. #IMD2025

...Excellence emerges when we move as one system while preserving individual contributions, recognizing, honing, and building upon each person's unique strengths.

...This traditional form predates today's Bollywood beats and reveals something fundamental about human coordination.

🎶 The best #engineering and #design teams too develop a clarity, working rhythm, and mutual awareness that sustains momentum, one that doesn’t need constant articulation...

✨ Centuries of dance offer what even our most advanced organizations still chase.

🥁 At the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art's "Delighting Krishna" exhibit, I was drawn to a mid-19th-century painting of garba raas, showing women dancing in a circle with synchronized, alternating claps...

An engineer, an educator, and an evolutionary biologist walk into a bar...(well, actually, we talked at @evmed.bsky.social meetings); today, 3 years later, our plans for a new bridge between engineering and medicine are published in @pnasnexus.org!

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

⚙️ We challenge the “body-as-machine” metaphor which oversimplifies organic complexity. We reflect on broader and bolder pathways for collaboration: engineers learning from biological adaptation while medicine adopting engineering’s failure analyses. 🧬

#Medicine #Evolution

While #engineering juggles performance and cost for product improvements, evolution bets on gene transmission, often sacrificing #health.

✈️ Consider the Boeing 737 Max 8: a single sensor oversight, driven by market pressures, led to catastrophic crashes. Contrast this with scurvy, where a random mutation disabled vitamin C synthesis, a biological flaw evolution couldn’t rewind. 🍋

🦚 The narrow human birth canal and peacock’s impractical tail both represent evolutionary failures but for reasons utterly different from why bridges collapse or software crashes. 🌉

⚠️ Explanations for failures in designed and evolved systems. 🚫
🔓Read here in @pnasnexus.org : academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
🔍 @randynesse.bsky.social, Jay Labov, and I compare body and machine vulnerabilities such as design deficiencies, corrupted plans, assembly variations, and trade-offs. ⚖️

🔄 True #resilience isn’t about bouncing back—it’s about bouncing forward. In my recent #TEDx talk, I challenge what #resilience really means—with help from warships, a pointy-nosed engineer, a childhood memory and a goat-footed god! 🐐

📺 www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5r3...

#engineering

Bloom brightly and radiate hope, even if only for a season. 🌸

Spot, a four-legged robot by Hyundai Boston Dynamics, at an exhibition event in Bangkok, Thailand, in March 2023.

A review explores the possibilities and challenges of using AI in engineering. From autonomous vehicles, to robots, to AI-assisted surgery, we are entering an era of machines that can sense, learn, and make decisions without human supervision. In PNAS Nexus: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

📞 Agner Erlang’s teletraffic formulas and Margaret Hutchinson’s penicillin win showed how breakthroughs become lifelines. 💉

⚙️ Sir Ronald Ross said it takes a decade to grasp a new idea—half a decade on, the pandemic’s lesson shines: we’re only as strong as the infrastructure we overlook. ⏱️

⏱️Five years ago, as COVID hit, I wrote in @wsj.com that engineering—not just medicine—would steer our recovery. Time bore it out: logistics outran tactics.

📡 Engineers scaled vaccines to billions in record time, fueled remote work, and held supply chains together when borders shut.

Engineering and AI: Advancing the synergy Abstract. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), driven by unprecedented data and computing capabilities, have tran

Out in @pnasnexus.org! We explore engineered AI systems in autonomous vehicles, robotics, materials discovery, and medical applications—highlighting the need for safety, reliability, and effectiveness in their design and deployment. #AI #engineering
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

🤝 Infrastructure—whether dams, power grids, ports, or railways—serves as the unsung stabilizer behind lasting peace, often outliving the rulers and regimes that created them. 🕊️

🙏Thanks to Kishore Mahbubani for inspiring and inviting this piece.