COSMOS
When I first heard about my two-week assignment to write an essay on the ethics of some engineering-related topic at COSMOS, a STEM-centered summer program held by the UC colleges in California, I was exasperated by the program’s delegation of time away from the physical projects and activities I could be working on instead. Why should I spend my time writing about something as intangible as ethics, when I could be exploring the school’s state-of-the-art labs, having intriguing conversations with professors, and working with modern technologies to gain more engineering skills?
As I reluctantly scoured the internet for possible topics, I learned about the ethical issues behind many modern technologies, including biodiesels, voice assistants, and autonomous vehicles. Despite the potential of these inventions to advance society by leaps and bounds, they come tied with numerous moral issues. Is clearing biodiverse land to cultivate biodiesels conducive to the environment? How is a line drawn between protecting a person’s privacy and collecting data to improve voice recognition? Should an autonomous car prioritize its passengers’ lives or a pedestrian’s? These ethical issues cannot be resolved easily, but by being aware of them and understanding the pitfalls within our work, we can make more socially-conscious technologies that anticipate and address possible problems. In discovering and writing an ethics essay on engineering, I realized that moral, emotional reflection is important in engineering.
With the skills and knowledge we have built over the centuries of human domination, if we become blinded by our power to create, we will end up destroying everything. As engineers, we have the ability to construct unimaginable technologies. If we are not in tune with our emotions and the emotions of others, we can forget about the scope of our work and how it affects the coming generations. Just because we have the power to create something doesn’t mean we should. While innovating and designing solutions to the problems around us, we have to remind ourselves how the world will be affected and wrestle over whether or not we should be opening Pandora’s box. Being emotionally aware and understanding the perspectives of everyone, not just of the audience we are building solutions for, but of the people who may be indirectly affected by our work and thus oppose it, will allow us to construct more ethical devices.
