This is supposed to be why they make you take one semester worth of ethics and learn about Therac 25 and that hotel with the incorrect bolted connection on its catwalk and whatnot, but it’s a fucking joke that misses the point. Even in concept, it is wholly inadequate to stopping engineers from working for evil, especially if it isn’t poorly-designed.
Because it is never designed to stop them from that. Even if you make them take double their science classes in ethics. You would need to explain to them why some company like lockheed martin can pay them magnitudes more, with a more stable job, and why they shouldn’t take the job.
The ethics classes are designed to explain that the engineer is responsible for that his invention and/or design doesn’t kill/damage what it wasn’t supposed to. A bad staircase which breaks beneath people would be unethical for example, however that cluster bomb which can erase a small village is very ethical, it kills and destroys only the target, even if this bomb is used by say terrorists who blow some hospital, the engineer is still ethical because it blew the target.
That is all to say that the ethics class is doing jackshit but also was never going to do it in the first Place, and also the root of the problem is not inadequate ethics classes, but huge inequalities.
This is supposed to be why they make you take one semester worth of ethics and learn about Therac 25 and that hotel with the incorrect bolted connection on its catwalk and whatnot, but it’s a fucking joke that misses the point. Even in concept, it is wholly inadequate to stopping engineers from working for evil, especially if it isn’t poorly-designed.
Because it is never designed to stop them from that. Even if you make them take double their science classes in ethics. You would need to explain to them why some company like lockheed martin can pay them magnitudes more, with a more stable job, and why they shouldn’t take the job.
The ethics classes are designed to explain that the engineer is responsible for that his invention and/or design doesn’t kill/damage what it wasn’t supposed to. A bad staircase which breaks beneath people would be unethical for example, however that cluster bomb which can erase a small village is very ethical, it kills and destroys only the target, even if this bomb is used by say terrorists who blow some hospital, the engineer is still ethical because it blew the target.
That is all to say that the ethics class is doing jackshit but also was never going to do it in the first Place, and also the root of the problem is not inadequate ethics classes, but huge inequalities.