cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
The demise and rebirth of the Ethical Engineer - Techcrunch
Whatever happened to the ethics of engineering?
We’ve seen just one disastrous news story after another these past few years, almost all knowable and preventable. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear power plants melting down. Foreign powers engorging on user data. Environmental testing thrashed. Electrical grids burning states to the ground.
The patterns are not centered around discipline or nationality, nor do these events share an obvious social structure. Facebook machine learning programmers mostly don’t hang with German VW automotive engineers or Japanese nuclear plant designers. They weren’t taught at the same schools, nor share the same textbooks, nor read the same journals.
Instead, there is a more fundamental thread that binds these disparate and heinous stories together: the increasingly noxious alchemy of complexity and capitalism. Only through a rejuvenation of safety culture can we hope to mend the pair.
Whatever happened to the ethics of engineering?
We’ve seen just one disastrous news story after another these past few years, almost all knowable and preventable. Planes falling out of the sky. Nuclear power plants melting down. Foreign powers engorging on user data. Environmental testing thrashed. Electrical grids burning states to the ground.
The patterns are not centered around discipline or nationality, nor do these events share an obvious social structure. Facebook machine learning programmers mostly don’t hang with German VW automotive engineers or Japanese nuclear plant designers. They weren’t taught at the same schools, nor share the same textbooks, nor read the same journals.
Instead, there is a more fundamental thread that binds these disparate and heinous stories together: the increasingly noxious alchemy of complexity and capitalism. Only through a rejuvenation of safety culture can we hope to mend the pair.