BENCHMARK July 2025

BENCHED

View From Your Editorial Team

Anyone else spending an awful lot of time reading about, thinking about, meeting about, and talking about AI at the moment? I can’t work out where I am on the “excited to terrified” scale right now. I guess your level of anxiety vs excitement by it all depends on what applications you’re looking into at any one time. My current exposure ranges from creating guidance videos and podcasts in an interesting accent from PDFs, to reading about how the simulation industry is increasingly embedding AI tools into software, with the potential to save millions of hours and dollars. Quite the range. And quite the difference in perspectives.

All of this comes against a backdrop of wildly extreme opinions — from AI being the core of our future work and social lives, changing humanity and society itself, to seeing it as an over-hyped bubble that is starting to show signs of bursting. You could be forgiven for thinking we’re discussing Taylor Swift’s new album (which is excellent, by the way, and I won’t hear a word against it), as opposed to the next step in computers and how we interact with them.

We don’t actually know what’s coming. Anyone who tries to tell you they do is either severely misguided, full of their own self-importance, or trying to take a significant chunk of your money. Or all three. We were all in the dark, grasping for just a glimpse of what the future might hold, afraid, uncertain, and nervous, until Taylor dropped “The Fate of Ophelia” and everything was right in the world. It’s the same with AI. We’ve no idea what’s coming. So, we can either allow ourselves to be held back by that uncertainty, or we can choose to be propelled forward by it.

Fittingly, this issue of Benchmark is packed with people, projects, and ideas looking straight ahead, not over their shoulders. We’ve got two NWC25 award-winning articles about tackling the big questions head-on. The first throws us into the deep end of clean aviation, with special nods to the extraordinary work in the EU-funded NEWBORN project. The second tackles a problem we can’t seem to shake: single-use plastic. The stuff that, quite literally, refuses to go away.

Staying on the theme of unpredictability, we have a summary of the results of a recent challenge from our Stochastics Working Group. The article urges us to ask “What does the decision maker using the results need?” when analysing data, and that’s a good question to bear in mind, whatever the circumstance. And, as ever, Monica and Laurence have returned with their takes on the big engineering talking points of the day: Monica sets her sights on AI, while Laurence uncovers the dangers of oversimplification (you have been warned).

Maybe the only advice worth giving — and I’m as guilty as anyone of resisting it — is to get uncomfortable. Try what doesn’t feel easy. Ignore the well-trodden path and look for the road that leads somewhere new. That’s where the real breakthroughs are hiding.

As ever, enjoy this issue of Benchmark, and let us know what you’re thinking (even if it’s unpredictable or uncomfortable. In fact, especially if it is!). Just don’t even think about slagging off Taylor Swift — it’s not worth your time, as my family will testify.

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