So I went to the Deborah Johnson's lecture on Ethics and Technology this evening and a couple thoughts came to mind. The only problem is that these thoughts are scattered all over the place (typical me) and aren't totally solid yet. Not to mention it will take a while to get them down in words. I'll start with some small pieces, loosely joined, and then maybe by the end have a big picture of it all.
Engineers need to be aware that their work has a social implication involved with it. I agreed with this point, but some people in the audience (::sneers:: and ::grins::) suggested that engineers use a checklist to make sure their designs cover these points. Another person in the audience wanted to know if there was a class in engineering schools that teach engineers about ethics and social issues. I only wish it were as easy as a checklist or a class. (1) Engineers rarely design by checklist. Engineers create a new design from what's inside them: their knowledge, their understanding of the problem and constraints, their life experiences, and their values and views of the world. This is why there's this huge push for usability engineering, accessible designs, universal design, and cognitive engineering. A designer or engineer has to design with these values in mind, and really in heart, from the start, not at the end. (2) If you want to begin with responsible design in mind, why in the world would you educate engineers in the exact opposite way that you want them to think? Ethics, social implications, user considerations should be taught, discussed, addressed all the way through a program, not have one tack-on class at the end. That's exactly what the problem is now in business and engineering schools. Instead of having ethics, values, and societal implications being discussed while working on their projects, they are covered in a totally separate class, in a totally separate mindset, apart from the engineering activities. If that's the way it's taught, how can we not expect the student to treat those issues as always separate and independent of "real work?" Due to the nature of the education system, there isn't really an easy way to teach about holistic design and thinking. Each course is a chunk of material, and that's the way the system is so we can have units to charge tuition, assign grades, and advance in credits. Unfortunately, nothing in the system helps students bring those chunks together, and more importantly, realize that these chunks are all related. The one thing that I wish everyone could see my way is to realize that there is only one reality/nature, and any lines that humans draw between things are imposed on that reality and are artificial boundaries. For instance, one that pops up frequently in my field: "are you engineering team or business team?" In my opinion, if you want to be good, you have to be both. If one focuses on pure technical and ignores the business (marketing) aspect, one presents a product that has no demand in the marketplace and then the operation fails. If one focuses on pure business and ignores the implications of the technical, the operation also fails because it's infeasible or creates problems. One needs both business and engineering together to be successful in the current marketplace, understand the user (engineering), understand the customer (marketing).. but wait, the user is the customer and the customer is the user! (Keep in mind, business and engineering knowledge are only two small factors in a much larger domain that I am thinking about.)
As much as I'd love for everyone to be holistic in their thinking, I understand that it is really hard to be holistic, as under the current conditions of globalization, people who specialize in things (opposite of holistic) are preferred and rewarded more. People who have very particular knowledge and skill are rewarded more because they can produce or provide something that few others can (that is, low supply of specialists, high demand for them, meaning they provide high value). So there's not much incentive of knowing it all and being considerate to all factors if one can be more successful (in an economic sense) by knowing one thing really really well. Maybe one solution is that we need people who specialize in generalistic, holistic thinking... heh. However, if these generalists don't understand the underlying issues deeply enough (which typically is the case in my experience), they tend to be ineffective in their work.
One topic I sort of touched on in a conversation earlier this week that came back into mind this evening is that people have to understand that science is not absolute truth. Again, there is only one reality, but we humans need to look at little pieces at a time to understand it.. but we tend to forget that these little pieces all lead back to the single reality. Evolution is a big topic these days. Like anything else in science, evolution is a
model. A model is a
representation of the real world. Our goal in science is to develop models that are as true to the real world as possible. Evolution is the best model that we have right now to explain the observations that we've made. As we find more data and evidence, we can either refine the model to be more true to life, or we can reject the model in favor of a better one. Now here's the catch, sometimes we choose less accurate models which are more simple to help us understand some basic principles. Depending on the context, you might not even need the more accurate model. For example, when we were in middle school, we were taught that electrons orbit around a nucleus in an atom, and the pictures showed electrons orbiting protons and neutrons in circular orbits. Then we went to high school and found out that those circular orbits are really s and p orbitals that aren't circular at all. Then we went to college and found out that electrons can go anywhere they damn well please and those s and p orbitals are probability distribution functions that tell us where the electrons are likely to be. So, all of these were
models of our understanding, all that were correct, but in their own contexts. My issue with science education is no one is told that these are models.. so by the time I got to college and I was working on my chemistry problems, I was still thinking about circular orbits in my head and couldn't shake the picture of them because I was believing that everything I learned in science classes are absolute truth because hey, it's objective, it's science!
So back to engineering. When engineers design something, they are designing to their
understanding of the problem, a
model. The optimal solution to the model does not mean that it is the optimal solution to the problem itself because the model can be either less true or more true to the problem. When we look at problems, we choose the factors of the problem we want to examine. A good designer will know which factors to examine (because you can't examine them all), and of course, those chosen factors come from what I talked about above: experience, knowledge, values, and viewpoints. This is why there is never one solution to a problem, because people choose to emphasize different values and criteria in their design differently. In emergency conditions, a Boeing aircraft relegates all controls to the pilot and copilot because the Boeing engineers value the judgement of the humans on board. An Airbus aircraft will relegate all controls to the flight computer as the computer has faster reaction time and has more stored experience than a pilot. Both systems work to solve the problem fairly effectively, but it's obvious how the designers' had different models of the emergency conditions problem and their values came through in the design.
Geez, what a mess. Some day I'm going to get this all straightened up in my head.
I'll try to clean this up a bit for you very patient readers of mine and next time, more on sociotechnical systems.
