Prof Duncan McFarlane Elected to the Royal Academy of Engineering

"What does a cell in your body have to do with a product on a factory floor?"

Prof Duncan McFarlane asked me that early in my PhD, and I had no idea where he was going with it.

A whole and a part at once

He started sketching. A cell looks after itself: it takes in what it needs, repairs itself, reacts to what's around it. But it's also part of an organ, and the organ is part of a body. Arthur Koestler had a name for that, a holon, something that is a whole and a part at once. "Now imagine a factory built like that," he said. No master controller. Machines, orders and products each acting as agents, sorting things out between themselves and carrying on when something breaks. He'd been building exactly that since the 1990s, long before anyone called software agentic.

Identity first, then agency

He also saw that an agent has to know what it is before it can act. He brought that thinking to the Auto-ID work, which gave physical objects a digital identity and is now built into supply chains around the world.

Identity was only the first step, though. The question he kept coming back to was how to make a product truly intelligent, with agency of its own, and I had the pleasure of working on it with him. Taking our cue from holons, we arrived at a product that knows what it is, talks to the world around it, and has a say in its own fate. That combination of identity and intelligence became the basis on which we spun out RedBite together.

The questions physical AI is asking now

Decades later, physical AI is running into the same questions his group was working on back then. How much autonomy should each agent have, and how do agents cooperate when nobody is in charge? What happens to the whole system when one of them fails? The tools have changed a great deal since then, but those questions haven't.

To me that is what vision means: seeing the shape of a problem thirty years before the tools arrive, and patiently building the foundations anyway.

Congratulations, Duncan, on your election as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. It is a fitting recognition of ideas that the rest of us are only now catching up with.

The IfM's announcement has more on his work, and I have written about the history behind these ideas separately.