I recently attended the
annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE).
APPE is a group comprised of applied ethicists and professionals who
meet to share common concerns and insights. I usually attend because APPE is the place
where you are most likely to run into engineering and computer ethicists. In most years, there are only three or four
sessions on these topics, which usually leave you crying out for more. This year’s meeting was different – it
featured an NSF-funded preconference workshop on “Pervasive and Autonomous
Technology” (PAIT) and a post-conference “mini-conference” on “ Engineering
towards a More Just and Sustainable World” (EMJSW) sponsored by the National
Academy of Engineering’s Center for Engineering, Ethics and Society (both of
which I played a role in planning).
The PAIT workshop focused
on two related but somewhat different technological concepts, pervasive (or
ubiquitous) computing and autonomous technology (e.g., “smart” robots). The workshop brought together two dozen
experts (mostly academics) in such fields as artificial intelligence, computer
ethics and science & technology studies to explore the social and ethical
implications of PAIT. As is the case in
most such workshops, the value was not so much in the products as in the
process. Old acquaintances were renewed
and new networks were formed. Most of
the PAIT technologies can be classified as “emerging technologies;” as such
they pose difficult legal and ethical questions as well as fundamental
questions about the governance of technology.
At the APPE meeting
proper I was involved in a presentation of the latest educational video
produced by the National Institute of Engineering Ethics. The film, Henry’s
Daughters, is about ethical conflicts encountered by three family members
working on the same intelligent transportation system project. The executive producers (of which I am one)
explicitly set out to include gender issues such as sexual harassment in the
video along with other more typical engineering ethics topics such as
conflict-of-interest, intellectual property, bribery, and public safety &
welfare. Some audience members (mostly
men) thought the gender issues were a distraction in the video (we expected to
hear this). Others (mostly women)
thought the gender issues were poorly presented – the most surprising comment
was that since one of the daughters was a single woman in her thirties the
video gave the false impression that women had to give up raising families to
be successful in engineering.
The EMJSW workshop, which
attracted some engineering practitioners as well as academic ethicists, in
contrast to the PAIT workshop, considered familiar themes – social and
environmental justice – but in an unfamiliar context: engineering. Unlike the PAIT workshop, which despite spirited
disagreements was largely conducted in a cooperative atmosphere, the EMJSW conference
featured heated debate and rancor between engineering traditionalists and those
who favor total engagement by engineers in these topics. This was particularly true in the first panel
on “Engineering and Social Justice” where the traditionalists said the social
justice folks were “not ready for prime time” and the social justice contingent
accused the traditionalists of “arrogance.”
By the end of the week I
had had my fill of hotel coffee and the arguments of engineering and computer
ethicists on both familiar (if unique to engineering) issues such as social
justice and novel issues posed by emerging technologies such as pervasive
mobile computing and autonomous military robots. A term some of us have applied to these
issues is “macroethics” to distinguish them from the more traditional
engineering ethics issues involving conduct of individuals (i.e.
“microethics”). Whatever you choose to
call it, to paraphrase the well-worn catch-phrase, “it’s not your father’s – or
mother’s – engineering ethics.”
