3 Questions: Why infrastructure is entering a defining era

For centuries, infrastructure has evolved alongside technology. New materials and engineering techniques enabled taller buildings, longer bridges, and larger cities. Computing and digital technologies later transformed how infrastructure was designed, monitored, and operated. Now, the pace of change is accelerating, and challenges are arriving simultaneously. Climate change is increasing pressure on water, energy, and other resources. Artificial intelligence is beginning to transform engineering and design, and its energy needs, along with aging grid infrastructure, is creating significant challenges, as well as new opportunities. In addition, geopolitical complexity is exposing vulnerabilities in global supply chains, and demand for infrastructure is rising, particularly in the developing world. The result is a fundamental challenge: How can the world build the infrastructure it needs without simply repeating the extractive, carbon- and resource-intensive model of the 20th century? In this interview, Ali Jadbabaie, JR East Professor and head of the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says the answer will require rethinking not only how infrastructure is designed and built, but how it is financed and operated, and bringing together the many stakeholders who shape those decisions. On Oct. 28, Jadbabaie will join experts from around the world in Madrid to explore these topics at the World Infrastructure Forum, which was co-founded by MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UPM, the World Bank Group, and the University of Texas at Austin. Q: Infrastructure has always evolved in response to technological advances. What makes this era different? A: In the 18th century, civil engineering emerged as the civilian counterpart to military engineering, building the dams, bridges, and canals of its time. Industrialization in the 19th century brought railways and sewage systems. In the early 20th century, the focus scaled up to buildings, highways, tunnels, and metro systems, and by mid-century the infrastructure needed to support megacities and skyscrapers. Every time technology has changed, with information technologies, computing, sensing, and, more recently, digital transformation, it has changed the shape of infrastructure. It has even changed the definition of what infrastructure is. Today, we consider the power grid, semiconductor manufacturing plants, and data centers part of infrastructure, along with wireless infrastructure like cellphone towers and the infrastructure for high-speed internet, just as much a part of our critical infrastructure as roads, water systems, and power grids. What is different now is the combination and speed of the changes we're facing. Climate change, resource constraints, and geopolitical instability are putting pressure on the way we designed infrastructure in the 20th century. At the same time, many people are moving out of poverty because of recent economic growth in the developing world. In fact, according to models, by 2028, for the first time in the history of humanity, the median human inhabitant of the planet will live off $10 a day. As more people move out of abject poverty, there will also be an increase in the demand for infrastructure. If we try to meet that demand using the same resource-intensive model we used in the 20th century, we simply won't have the resources to do it. The question then becomes: How do we use the remaining resources more efficiently? We need to find a way to provide more infrastructure while using less water, energy, and materials, and produce less carbon. This is where digital transformation and AI become potentially transformative. Faster and cheaper sensing, greater access to data, and better sensing, actuation, and control can help us make infrastructure decisions more efficiently. AI is slowly permeating the physical world, and we expect it to revolutionize the engineering design process, allowing us to explore many more possibilities, much faster and at a lower cost. But the story of that hasn't been written yet, and the outcomes could still be very positive, depending on what we do. Q: Can you give an example of infrastructure systems becoming more interconnected in a way that changes how we build or manage them? A: The revolution in information technology and digital transformation over the past 30 years has made infrastructure systems more interconnected. You see this in cities. If the power goes out, water and gas systems can stop functioning, internet fails, and transportation system comes to a halt. If communications networks fail, many other services are affected. We saw this during Covid, when disruptions in supply chains affected energy networks, critical materials, and manufacturing. We see it when geopolitical conflicts disrupt oil and energy markets and those disruptions propagate through other parts of the global economy. Infrastructure systems that were once managed separately are increasingly dependent on one another. As we connect more things together for more efficiency, we also increase systemic risk and expose the systems to rare but catastrophic failures. They have become rare, but when they happen, they're much bigger and more consequential. The really tricky thing is that developing infrastructure involves much more than designing and building it. The whole value chain includes financing and operating it, as well as understanding who will use it and what those users need and prefer. So, designing infrastructure is a highly transdisciplinary, sociotechnical endeavor, involving social, technical, and economic considerations. Understanding how these systems are designed is increasingly important because they are becoming more complex, making decision-making particularly difficult. There’s also so much uncertainty in large infrastructure projects. They’re very capital-intensive, the business is lower margin than many other industries, and projects take a long time. Combine all of that, and it has historically made the industry very conservative. But the transformations coming from AI and digital transformation are potentially offering a new way forward. What that new way looks like, no one has quite delineated it yet. Q: How are you and your colleagues working to change how these decisions get made? A: We realized that if we're going to develop a new approach to infrastructure, no single discipline, company, or country can do it alone. Infrastructure value chain is too interconnected, and the challenges are too large. That's why MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering co-founded the World Infrastructure Forum with the World Bank Group, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and University of Texas at Austin. The goal is to bring together academia, industry, governments, and financial institutions across the infrastructure value chain and create an ongoing dialogue about how infrastructure should be designed, financed, built, and operated in the decades ahead. This is particularly important because the biggest opportunities for new infrastructure development are not necessarily in the United States or other countries with mature infrastructure systems. Those countries still face significant needs for modernization and new investment. But over the coming decades, much of the world's population growth, and much of the infrastructure that will need to be built, will be in countries where infrastructure systems are still developing. Those countries have an opportunity to benefit from modern infrastructure without simply repeating the model of the 20th century. But capturing that opportunity will require new approaches to technology, financing, engineering, and governance. We're trying to create an ecosystem rather than just a forum, a mechanism for continuing the conversation among the different stakeholders across the infrastructure value chain. We've established five working groups and an advisory group of more than 30 leaders from across the infrastructure value chain, including engineering and construction, materials, finance, multilateral institutions, and academia. Ultimately, the question is not whether we need a new way of developing infrastructure. The question is how we create it and who is going to execute it. There is no single person, company, or country that can solve this problem, because infrastructure itself is interconnected. We need to build the new model together.