Herbst Fellows

Unethical Engineering: Understanding the Discrepancy Between Intent and Behavior in Tech

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 23:46:54 +0000

Unethical Engineering: Understanding the Discrepancy Between Intent and Behavior in Tech Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/10/2022 - 17:46

Zahraa Abbasi

Clarifai, an AI startup translating images and video into structured data, was committed to philanthropic practices such as donating software to socially beneficial causes. This was the Clarifai that Liz O’Sullivan was familiar with when she joined the team in 2017.¹²Several months later, O’Sullivan found herself in a workplace with a vastly different character. The office, which had paper covering the windows, was dubbed “The Chamber of Secrets” due to the clandestine nature of its meetings. Outsiders, along with the team themselves, were unsure of what they were building but the CEO assured them that they were saving lives. Shockingly, upon further inspection of project documentation, O’Sullivan and the rest of her team deduced that the company was working for the Department of Defense. When confronted with their discovery, the Clarifai CEO merely confirmed that their software would likely be used for autonomous weaponry. Liz O'Sullivan quit the next day. ⁹

Experiences similar to O’Sullivan’s are ubiquitous within tech companies, most notably within tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Amazon. During my time working in big tech, I encountered several engineers who quietly parted ways with their company due to ethical concerns about what they were building. Now, as graduation creeps closer, I am inclined to ask myself what I would do if I found myself in a situation like this. My immediate response seems obvious— of course, I would speak out and leave the company if necessary. That is the right thing to do, therefore, it is what I would do. Despite my gut reaction, I am reminded that Liz O’Sullivan was the only person to leave Clarifai, even though each person on the team was privy to the same information. ⁹ They’re not alone in this: A survey conducted by Indeed found that 15 percent of 1000 participants claimed to have worked for a company involved in a public scandal. Of the 38 percent of workers, 15 percent continued to work at their company. ¹ Fundamentally, I know that people who choose to continue working on unethical projects are not evil people. They may be good people who, like most, want to contribute meaningfully to the world. For this reason, I ask: Why do people engage in unethical behavior when their intent is to do what is right?

The answer to this question is rooted in the three-step process of ethical decision-making illustrated below, in Figure 1. This process begins with a person’s awareness or the ability to recognize that a situation calls for ethical consideration. This is followed by personal judgment or the ability to decide which potential outcomes are right or wrong. Lastly, there is the final action taken. Ultimately, these actions are based upon a mix of what a person believes is right and the inevitable, unconscious biases that affect their decision making processes (Gino, 2015). ⁷Recognizing these unconscious biases is crucial to understanding why people engage in unethical behavior that seemingly conflicts with their moral predispositions. Ultimately, these biases can be classified into five different situational and social forces.

Figure 1

The Ethical Decision-Making Process (Gino, 2015). ⁷

The first of these situational forces is the appeal of a short-term reward. In 2015, a Harvard study found that people hold two competing motivations: a long-term desire to be good and a short-term desire to reap an immediate gain such as recognition, a promotion, or financial compensation. ⁷ Engaging and justifying unethical behavior in exchange for this reward is known as “justified neglect.” Unfortunately, justified neglect is pervasive in the tech community as high compensation motivates employees to primarily focus on what they might gain from the job at hand. ³ A cursory analysis of tech compensation explains why it is so enticing. “Dice’s Tech Salary Report” found that the average tech salary in 2021 was $104,566.⁵ For engineers, this average number is slightly higher at around $130,000, as shown in Figure 2 (Dice, 2022). However, salaries are regularly far greater than this. Due to demand for engineers, companies facing public backlash have been offering higher pay to attract talent. One such company is Amazon, which recently announced that the maximum base pay would increase to $350,000, an almost 120 percent increase from the previous cap of $160,000. ¹³ In addition to base pay, employees typically receive restricted stock units, which easily doubles their compensation. A quick search on Glassdoor or Levels.fyi, websites that allow employees to anonymously share their compensation, confirms that similar earnings exist across most big tech companies and high valued startups. Thus, as people try to balance their motivation to do good and to be paid well, they are often inconsistent in their moral behavior.

At the same time, rather than seeking reward, employees seek to avoid loss. A study found that self-serving cognitions are heightened by organizations that expect higher levels of performance. This is because “high performance elicits performance pressure to avoid significant consequences” such as loss of employment. ¹¹ Ultimately, it is the urge to avoid these potential losses that motivate unethical behavior.

Armed with this knowledge, companies have capitalized on motivational forces to discourage employees from resisting directives. Take, for example, Meta’s performance review process. At its core, employees are graded and ranked against each other by their managers. At the end of each bi-annual review, the bottom 15 percent of people are dismissed from the company. ⁴ In order to maintain a high ranking, employees are dissuaded from giving managers critical feedback or challenging decisions even if they know them to be harmful. In fact, Facebook engineer Sophie Zhang found that simply bringing software misuse to light can come at the cost of unemployment. In 2017, Zhang became aware of authoritarian governments that were using fake Facebook pages to influence politics around the world. When she took her findings to management, Zhang said her managers told her to “stop finding fake political accounts and focus on her main job responsibilities.” Soon afterward, Zhang was fired for what Facebook claimed to be poor performance. ⁶ Zhang’s story illustrates how having the economic privilege to speak out without fear of being fired or blacklisted from the tech world is crucial to employee activism. To an employee with a single-income family or a new grad employee under an H-1B visa with limited job opportunities, self-protection may be more valuable than conducting ethical behavior and facing retaliation.

Figure 2: Average Tech Salary by Occupation from "Dice’s Tech Salary Report" 2022
Occupation	2021	Change from 2020
C-Suite Management	$151,983	+ 6.0%
Systems Architect	$147,901	+5.1%
Cyber Security Engineer	$135,059	+0.5%
Business Consultant	$126,531	+4.0%
Porgram manager	$120,755	+0.8%
Software developer	$120,204	+8.0%
Data Engineer	$117,295	-1.1%
UI/UX Designer	$101,260	+10.6%
Web Developer	$98,912	+21.3%
Network Engineer	$93,373	+2.0%
Systems Administrator	$88,642	+6.2%
Technical support engineer	$77,169	+12.4%

However, avoidance of loss is not the sole reason employees often do not challenge the status quo— this can also be attributed to a human tendency to show obedience to authority. In Stanley Milgram’s notorious shock experiments, a researcher instructed ordinary people to press a button that delivered a “shock” to another unseen person. Though there were no shocks being delivered at all, the participants were unaware of this and received feedback that they were inflicting pain on the recipient. Despite this, they did not stop pressing the button to deliver the shock when prompted by the researcher. From this study, Milgram found that people, despite knowing that they were causing harm, still felt the compelling need to obey an authoritative figure. ¹⁰ Such obedience starts young, as Pepperdine research aptly states:

Children are primed to obey their parents, their survival depends upon it and in school, this conditioning continues. Students automatically know that they must show deference to their teachers. Consequently, later in life, when the boss orders an employee to do something, many people quickly obey without thinking. ⁸

Thus, people are conditioned to comply with an order regardless of its ethical nature. However, this is not just concerning because it discourages people from challenging authority, it also contributes to leaders feeling omnipotent. Harvard research indicates that as leaders become more senior and receive increasingly less dissent, they become characterized by the feeling of invincibility. To the omnipotent leader, ethical boundaries apply to everyone except them. ¹⁵ Thus, a cycle is formed in which employees acquiesce to unethical directives which, in turn, encourages omnipotence in leadership, and so on.

In addition to situational pressures, there are social forces such as witnessing the unethical behavior of others that can be an antecedent to unethical behavior. In 2009, a study tasked a room full of students to complete a puzzle for a monetary reward. The reward each student could receive increased in correlation with how much of the puzzle was completed. The experiment purposefully allotted insufficient time to complete the entirety of the puzzle, making it impossible to earn the maximum award. In the first condition, students were simply asked to complete the puzzle, turn in their work, and collect their reward. In the second condition, a member of the research team posed as a student and announced that they finished the entire puzzle a minute after the solving time began. He then submitted his work and collected the full reward in front of the other students. Ultimately, this study found that the students who witnessed someone cheat were more likely to do it, replicating the behavior they observed. ⁷ When applied to the workplace, the dishonesty of others can be influential and become the social norm. This phenomenon, known as “cultural numbness,” shifts individual moral bearings towards the culture of an organization slowly, rather than in one abrupt switch. ¹⁵ Thus, dishonest behavior coupled with gradual homogeneity in ethical standards begets an environment overlooking unethical decision-making.

Similar to the effect of seeing other people act unethically, thinking that other people act unethically can be just as damaging. A University of New Mexico study asked a group of students to partake in a problem-solving test. Half of the participants received a successful score and half received a failing score regardless of what they answered. When prompted to predict the results of other students, those who succeeded were more likely to assume that others also succeeded. Whereas, those who failed were more likely to assume that others also failed. ¹⁴ These results highlight how people are susceptible to what is called the “false consensus effect.” This is a form of bias that causes people to see their own actions and judgments as “relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances” ² meaning that people assume others are likely to do what they would do. When applied to the workplace, this sentiment can allow employees to justify their wrongdoings by believing that everyone else would do it. And unfortunately, the more people are able to justify their behavior, the more likely they are to behave unethically.

Indeed, the stories in the media exposing unethical practices in tech companies have highlighted the gap between the behavior people believe they ought to have versus the behavior they actually have. Ultimately, this alarming discrepancy can be attributed to a range of situational and social forces that are so strong that they seem to make individual choices almost irrelevant as they corrode our ethical decision-making process. Over time, the enticement of reward, fear of loss, obedience to authority, numbness to culture, and deceit of the false consensus effect warp our ethical standards and moral principles and enable us to act in ways that conflict heavily with what we believe to be right.

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The Emotional, Political, “Oxymoronic” Engineer

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 19:39:51 +0000

The Emotional, Political, “Oxymoronic” Engineer Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/10/2022 - 13:39

Emma R. Gustavsson

Far before I ever stepped foot into a CU engineering classroom, I swore off the idea of ever working for an oil company. I’ve always been a staunch environmentalist and from that perspective, fewer industries can be blamed for the earth’s environmental collapse than oil companies. Fast forward to me in my second year, sitting in class, doing balancing calculations for a system running oil through it, considering a career in similar processes, shortly realizing that would mean a career in the oil industry. Shocked that I had lost sight of the context in which we were learning this process, I was disappointed in myself that I got lost in the numbers so quickly. If it did not take longer than a full two years for me to notice a shift in my moral perspective, this raises the question as to whether this is a common experience, and if so, why? Engineering programs have an obligation to provide students with both technical and ethical knowledge throughout their education. Both are fundamental to acting within the professional engineering world, and yet, ethics are shoved off to the side, deemed “too subjective” or “unimportant” when compared to the technical courses considered higher priority. The extremely limited technical scope through which engineering programs are built, along with the institutional facade of political neutrality, do an immense disservice to both the future engineers in it and subsequently the entire world.

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) awards accreditation to programs with student outcomes desired among engineering professionals, including, “an ability to apply engineering . . . with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare,” and “an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations . . . which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts”. ¹ ABET accredited university engineering programs have the obligation to produce engineers with a vested interest in improving the public welfare and have the ability to consider their engineering within broad societal contexts. The very first tenet of the National Society of Professional Engineers’ (NSPE) code of ethics is that engineers shall, “Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public”. ⁴ One would hope that engineers in these programs are recipients of robust ethical education, as that is necessary for adhering to these high ethical expectations, yet this couldn’t be further from the truth.

While engineering programs are arming their students with a tremendous amount of valuable technical knowledge, this comes at the cost of their societal awareness. This, in turn, prevents ethical thinking in the field. One who has never attempted engineering school likely would not understand the ferocity and speed with which the programs become highly specialized and what this means for students. Often, students who may have originally held strong beliefs about engineers’ role in society and strong ethical boundaries become swept up in the technical focus and almost entirely drop their ethical priorities. Erin Cech, an Associate Professor of Sociology and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, has dubbed this specific phenomenon a “culture of disengagement”. ² In her study of a large group of engineering undergraduates from four different universities, Cech found that, “Students’ experiences over the course of their undergraduate programs decreases their interest in the public welfare considerations of engineering work.” ² These results were corroborated by increased values of public welfare and of understanding the consequences of technology within cultures that emphasized the policy and societal implications of the engineering within them (Cech 2013). Between the findings from Cech’s study and the demonstrated standards for professional engineers and engineering programs, there is a stark and concerning disconnect between the ethical values graduating engineers actually possess and the ethical values expected of them.

Universities argue they are providing students with necessary ethics courses to build those expected values, and yet, the culture perpetuated among engineering students ensures these attempts at cultivating ethical awareness fail. A study conducted through surveys, interviews, and focus groups of engineering students from a technical course on the applications of military technology gave some insight as to what hurdles students face in the pursuit of increasing ethical awareness. ⁷ The first problem researchers encountered was that students mischaracterized pragmatism and efficiency as the social impacts of engineering, stating “Though students were readily able to discuss the technical and pragmatic mission given to the engineering profession, which is both vital and necessary, they struggled to derive the larger ethical concerns surrounding them”. ⁷ Despite the fact that human beings are not born with a value system that innately devalues ethics in exchange for utility and pragmatism, Lim et al. writes, “Many students did not consider the social relevance of the course content knowledge an important or even appropriate topic for discussion in the course. They contended that the curriculum should continue to focus on “the technical side” (Focus Group 6, 2017) while avoiding all value-related topics”. ⁷ Engineering students, themselves, have accepted and normalized the perspective that the technical coursework in their programs is of the utmost importance, while classes focused on humanities or ethics are less important, ultimately irrelevant to the grand scheme of their degree. I pose that this idea is easily thwarted when we analyze what has actually happened when engineers deeply commit to this principle in their careers.

History proves relevant in assessing what happens when engineers focus solely on doing their technical work over all else. Nazis at death camps, which were distinct from concentration camps in that their sole goal was immediate extermination, were able to murder millions of Jewish people despite only operating for a few years. In his paper, “The Nazi Engineers: Reflections on Technological Ethics in Hell”, Erik Katz (2010) of the new Jersey Institute of Technology explains that without a robust team of engineers and other technical professionals, this would not have been possible. ⁶ Albert Speer was one of the top architects to Hitler during WWII, securing a position as the Armaments Minister of the Nazi regime by the time he was done. ⁶ Katz specifically notes that,“As an architect, Speer is a technological professional, similar to an engineer, and thus he provides a useful case for the study of Nazi technological ethics,” and that his memoir is a very valuable resource for understanding the recipe responsible for engineers building literal death factories, seemingly unbothered by the consequences of their actions. In his memoir, Speer explained that he intentionally put highly technical individuals in charge of teams due to them being, “without scruple in their activities,” and Katz expands on this idea, writing, “It is not just Speer the architect who is unconcerned with political and moral values; all technological professionals, embedded in a world of neutral technological artifacts, are blind to the normative dimensions of their work and their products,”.⁶ After much analysis on the Nazis who hid behind technological neutrality, Katz concludes, “To live and work as ethical engineers, my students must be aware of the political and social goals that are served by their technological products. I can thus claim that if we remain in the thrall of the traditional view that the design and creation of technology is ethically neutral, then we will be repeating the mistakes of the Nazi engineers,”. ⁶ Cech stated that one of the primary reasons for the culture of disengagement within engineering education is a false belief that technology is politically and ethically neutral ², a philosophy that enabled many Nazi engineers to absolve themselves of guilt during and after the horrors of the Holocaust.

If engineering is inherently political in its implications, it is unacceptable for the institutions educating future engineers to entirely neglect that sphere of the profession. Scholars all over the world are now advocating for the “whole” engineer, one who is not only versed in the technical aspects of the career, but is also able to interact with the public in a clear manner, debate the values behind engineering topics, and assess the impact of their work in a larger, global context. As technology increases in complexity, so too must engineers in the scope of their roles and responsibilities. De Graff and Ravesteijn (2001) state, “A new kind of engineer is needed, an engineer with a solid foundation in basic sciences and construction technology, who on top of that is fully aware of what is going on in society and who has the skills to deal with those societal aspects.” ⁵ Unfortunately, engineering culture has an elitism problem propagating the idea that anything non-technical in nature is inherently inferior to the required technical coursework. Byron Newberry, an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Baylor, notes that while students in his engineering class are very capable and adept at applying existing ethical frameworks to contemporary issues, their emotional engagement with the material is simply leagues behind their intellectual engagement. When the class had discussions on ethics, students appeared enthusiastic and engaged, but rated that portion of the class the lowest after the semester. ⁹ He argues that this is not necessarily due to anything outright stated by the university, but rather that, “ the role of an organizational or institutional environment in shaping an individual’s values resides . . . in the underlying ethos, whether expressed or tacit, that permeates the environment, infusing it with a sense of which things are of ultimate importance”. ⁹ Newberry continues to explain that it takes one glance at almost any engineering curriculum to see exactly what is of said “ultimate importance:” technical education. Universities have made it very clear that anything not pertaining to specific, technical coursework comes secondary, and it leaves a lasting value system within the students of the institution. This puts universities in a difficult position, as solving the ethics deficit among its students is not as simple as requiring a course, but instead, requires an entire culture shift as well.

A culture that does not seek to intentionally affirm the importance of ethics among its students is stating the opposite by omission. The faculty of a program will define its culture by virtue of being its foundation, and many are simply not equipped to treat ethics with the approach necessary to invoke passion for it within their students. In regard to this idea, Newberry writes, “Current engineering faculty members are products of the admittedly ethics deficient undergraduate engineering educational system of past years, but also of the completely ethics-devoid graduate engineering educational system.” ⁹ Many times, instructors in charge of highly technical classes simply do not have the skills or background to infuse their lessons with ethics properly, leading them to either omit the conversation entirely or treat ethics almost in a corny fashion, which worsens students’ experience with the topic. A study analyzing lectures, notes, interviews, and other materials from a first year engineering class in Sweden determined that, “both instructors and students constructed ethics as not really actionable in the profession. Engineers should do what they are told to do: complete the projects they are given even if they do not think that doing so is ethically defensible” (Lönngren 2020). ⁸ Lönngren concludes in her paper that her study indicated that regardless of student and faculty interest in ethics as a topic, education on the matter may be rendered ineffective due to decades of unintentional framing that ethics is largely unimportant in the curriculum. At this point, we have come full circle and the issue of why ethics are undervalued in engineering programs becomes a chicken verses egg first debate, which is not helpful for solving the issue. Rather than assign blame and chastise the institutions that allowed ethics to become unimportant, it is more constructive to consider possible solutions.

The image of a “good engineer” has been one who is level-headed at all times, rational in the highest regard, and almost machine-like in their problem solving capabilities. This stereotype needs to die, and from its ashes a new one must be reborn: the emotional engineer. Sabine Roeser in “Emotional Engineers: Towards Morally Responsible Design” (2010), states, “Moral emotions make engineers sensitive to moral issues arising from the technologies they develop . . . They help us transcend a detached, abstract attitude that could lead to indifference to morally problematic aspects of technologies,” arguing that emotions are fundamental for helping engineers steer clear of a problem I defined earlier: detachment from the societal implications of their work. ¹⁰ De Graaff and Ravesteijn (2014) deem emotional intelligence, courage, and even one’s ability to sympathize with others as fundamental tools in the future engineer’s kit. ⁵ Scholars also emphasize the importance of acknowledging the inherent politics of participating in engineering, with Cech (2013) outright stating that one of the three causes of the culture of disengagement we see among engineers is, “the ideology of depoliticization . . . the belief that engineering work can and should be disconnected from ‘social’ and ‘political’ concerns because such considerations may bias otherwise ‘pure’ engineering practice.” ² In a different article by Cech from the same year, she states, “depoliticization allows engineers to carry on with their socially important work (e.g. food and medicine production) without having to grapple with the messiness that comes with actually engaging with questions of the effects of engineering work on society”. ³ The current culture among engineering undergrads, graduate students, instructors, and industry professionals alike, needs to be done away with in order to foster new values that allow space for emotions within the field and respect the inherent politics of the job.

For anyone paying attention, the results from Erin Cech’s study are alarming, and rightfully so. On a grand scale, academic institutions are tasked with the responsibility of creating a foundation for our future, and on a smaller one, are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by their students with the expectation that they provide a solid education in return. Currently, they are not upholding their end of the literal and symbolic transactions they are a part of. ABET accredited programs are taught with the goals of creating engineers who are not only able to assess the broader context in which they are conducting engineering, but also diligently care about the broader context. Cech (2013) demonstrates that not only are engineering programs not furthering their pupils’ ability to do these fundamental things, but they actively decrease students’ interests in the matter altogether. ² Organizations responsible for establishing codes of ethics for engineering also agree that the most important ethical responsibility of an engineer is to prioritize and seek to improve society’s health and welfare. If universities truly value their obligation to provide engineering students with the education they need to meet these criteria in the professional world, radical change is in order. However, before specific solutions can be proposed, it is crucial that institutions internalize that their underlying cultures are to blame for students’ emotional disengagement with the topic of ethics (Newberry 2004). ⁹ Until universities take an active role in shifting engineering culture away from its current staples: technical superiority, feigned political neutrality, and the complete erasure of human emotions within the field, they are, at best, complacent in the ethical failings of the profession as whole.

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Climate Migrants: People on the Move

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 18:38:25 +0000

Climate Migrants: People on the Move Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/10/2022 - 12:38

Maddie Karr

When we think of the devastating impact of climate change, our first thoughts are probably about melting ice caps, rising ocean water, and ecological collapse. However, we often miss the human element. One of those impacts will be changing human migration patterns.

Climate change will cause more people to leave their homes than ever before. The United Nations predicts that there will be up to one billion environmental migrants by 2050. ¹ Similar to refugees fleeing conflict, it is important to recognize the reasons for human migration and what people can do to help those who are displaced. As a future engineer myself, I think it is time we shine a light on what we can do to meet this ever-growing challenge.

Who are climate migrants?

Climate migrants are people who have to move from their current place of living due to the effects of climate change, including natural disasters like flooding, drought, rising temperatures, or rising sea levels. Climate migration is not simply driven by a sudden disaster. Rather it is the result of cumulative changes in local environments. In the case of rising sea levels, huge coastal cities may be engulfed in water during instances of coastal flooding. This will cause water damage to the housing and buildings. Coastal flooding can impact human health because it increases the risk of damage to drinking water infrastructure. It is not just urban spaces that are in danger. For example, increased salinity in areas of coastal flooding harms the production of crops. ² In drought-prone areas, agricultural land that once was a source of food and income will be no longer a place to survive. When groups of people who are dependent on agriculture are faced with longer dry seasons due to climate change, the options are to move or die. This issue is already happening today all over the world regardless of geography. People are leaving their homes in greater and greater numbers. When it comes to climate change, disaster compounds.

These problems are linked to global temperatures, which are rising at an alarming rate. A recent study found that “the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined”. ³ With this trend, some locations will become unbearably hot, forcing people to move toward cooler areas. Many more temperate areas already contain large populations. The population density in those areas has the potential to provide further stress on the resources available.

Making exact predictions about the number of people who will become climate migrants is challenging. Many social, cultural, and economic factors contribute to an individual’s decision to migrate, making motivations difficult to quantify. Most official state records do not contain the reason why people move to another country. Complicating the issue, many people relocate within their own country, looking for a more hospitable climate. Records are even less comprehensive for these internal migrations. However, the trend is clear, the longer we wait to stop climate change, the more people will lose their homes.

How governments should address climate migration is a source of debate. However, there is an existing precedent. Both climate migrants and conflict refugees are people that have to relocate for reasons beyond their control. Refugees have fled war, conflict, or persecution. In other words, refugees are those who have to move for immediate safety, and who often have a clear cause. Climate migrants are similar. They are people who are displaced because of the danger that the place they call home is no longer habitable. However, currently, climate migrants do not legally have refugee status according to international law. ⁴ I believe this should change in the future as the number of climate migrants increases. This is an urgent issue as refugee status provides legal protection, access to some social services, and state recognition.

How can engineers help?

Leaving behind the social and economic safety net of one’s home is a complex decision. Individuals are faced with many questions. Further, individuals tasked with addressing climate change and a potential future dominated by climate refugees also face an array of questions. We can break down some of these questions into four main categories: social, technical, economic, and political:

Social: How will a community decide to stay or go? What level of welfare and acceptance will be provided to those who have had to move? How will they preserve communities, languages, and culture across a potentially wide diaspora?
Technical: How can CO2 emissions be reduced to reduce the number of climate migrants? Can we build infrastructure like resilient buildings that reduce urban carbon footprints? How can we make urban centers better prepared for population growth?
Economic: How will those displaced find new sources of income? Should host communities support climate migrants? If so, how? Are governments willing to provide financial support to migrants?
Political: Should countries open borders to climate migrants? Will climate migrants gain legal refugee status? Should this be decided by individual nations or through international law?

Engineers can play a clear role in addressing the technical challenges facing climate migrants. However, it is important to recognize that even technical solutions to this challenge will require efforts from people of many different backgrounds and disciplines. Engineers of the future must recognize the problem. Any new technologies or production activities release a significant amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gasses are the root cause of climate change. We must act now to curb our emissions and invest in technology that sequesters CO2 from the environment. Since a certain amount of global warming, and therefore climate migration, is now “baked in” to our future, engineers should lead the way in adaptive design planning. The increased number of climate migrants will likely lead to more densely populated areas. Currently, these areas do not have the infrastructure to support the newly displaced people. We as engineers should be involved in the planning or implementation of sustainable living structures. New housing developments are already starting along this path, constructing elevated housing in coastal regions, using bio-friendly construction materials and techniques, and adding solar panels.

Engineers can also use computer models to help predict climate stress before it happens. Climate scenario modeling is a powerful tool for developing sustainable city planning. For example, models can predict future water demand, allowing planners to work with their city’s water utilities to design a more resilient water infrastructure. In one scenario, if lower predicted precipitation is in that area then a rainwater catchment for water may not be the better alternative, and groundwater or surface water alternatives should be considered instead. To help raise awareness about the utility of such projects, engineers should also continue to work with nonprofits and government agencies to make climate data accessible to the general public. One interesting resource that is worth checking out is the Climate Toolbox.The Climate Toolbox visualizes climate and hydrological predictions for our warming world.

Finally, it is important to accept the fact that challenges induced by climate change cannot only be solved with technology alone. It will also be dependent on engineers working together with other people, groups, and governments to help people displaced due to climate change. While technology can help predict climate stressors and aid planners in mitigating the worst impacts, climate change is already forcing people to move from their homes. Now is the time to act to help preserve the livelihoods of current and future climate migrants.

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Herbst Fellows pursue ethical and social impacts of engineering

Anonymous — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 18:59:51 +0000

Herbst Fellows pursue ethical and social impacts of engineering Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/28/2022 - 11:59

Jonathan Raab

Six students from across the College of Engineering and Applied Science were selected as Herbst Fellows this semester, joining an elite group of scholars who embody the program’s commitment to ethical engineering study and practice.

“This cohort of Herbst Fellows represents a diverse and intellectually curious group of engineers who are committed to engaging with the intertwined ethical and social impacts of science, engineering and technology,” said Assistant Professor Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, co-director of the Herbst Certificate in Engineering, Ethics & Society.

During their fellowship, the Herbst Fellows will undertake research projects to articulate solutions to pressing scientific and engineering challenges including climate change, sustainability, environmental justice and ethical design and business practices.

“These students are global citizens, with a broad understanding of human interconnectedness and diversity,” Stanford-McIntyre said.

Zahraa Abbasi

Computer Science, Senior

Zahraa applied to the fellowship program after taking Modern Science and Technological Society, having been inspired to think about and discuss topics including the ethical, social and technical consequences of engineering skills.

"I hope to explore the intersection of innovating at scale and human behavior,” Abbasi said. “I am enthusiastic about delving into questions such as: how and why do people rationalize the work they are doing if they know it to be unethical? Along with, at what point do people find said work to be unethical and what factors influence this threshold?"

Taylor Bata

Taylor Bata

Aerospace Engineering, Sophomore

“I loved my past ENES classes, and I thought that this would be a super enriching way to engage with the subject on a more intimate level,” Bata said.

“I am hoping to focus on cybersecurity, with the possibility of narrowing my focus to intercontinental relations regarding the increase of political conflict and proxy wars being fought online through hacking and bots.”

Emma Gustavsson

Emma Gustavsson

Chemical and Biological Engineering, Sophomore

“I feel that as a future engineer, I have a responsibility to consider the ethical implications of whatever I end up doing for my job,” Gustavsson said. “I also get to feed my humanities oriented brain with the fellowship and my project.”

Gustavsson wants to address the lack of consistent ethics education in engineering programs.

“Engineers become cogs in evil systems, and I feel that is partially due to the highly technical lens through which everything is taught,” Gustavsson said.” I'd like to assert, through my fellowship, that an engineering education necessitates constant ethical considerations the entire time, so engineers can be well rounded and a better force for doing good things with intention.”

Madeline Karr

Madeline Karr

Environmental Engineering, Fourth-Year (Bachelor's-Accelerated Master's program)

“I applied for the Herbst Fellowship position because scientific and engineering pursuits are too often estranged from their social and ethical implications,” Karr said.

“As an engineering student, I was excited to get a chance to pursue and consider some of these issues further than I would in any classroom. Additionally, I enjoy learning from others, especially when it is something that they are passionate about. I look forward to hearing from the other fellows about what they are researching.”

Karr plans to pursue a topic related to climate change, mitigation and adaption technologies, or water, sanitation and hygiene.

Hermann Klein-Hessling Barrientos

Hermann Klein-Hessling Barrientos

Chemical and Biological Engineering, First Year

“Having mixed heritage and being a person of color in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, I felt the Herbst Fellowship would provide an invaluable opportunity to discuss complex ethical and social implications grounded in perspectives and experiences that otherwise may not have been considered,” Klein-Hessling Barrientos said. “I have a vested interest in dissecting the history of eugenics, the rise of authoritarianism and fascism, as well as the relationship between policy makers, scientists and the general public.”

Samiha Singh

Samiha Singh

Environmental Engineering, Junior

“I was familiar with the Herbst program and its goal to bring a more worldly and holistic view to engineering that goes beyond just the technical curriculum, and that is a concept I am really excited about,” Singh said.

“I am hoping to look into the disparity between technical solutions and political implementation surrounding the climate change crisis. So far in my educational experience, I have noticed that engineers — students, faculty and industry professionals — are all very passionate about developing solutions to address climate change. And honestly, the technology that currently exists could make a significant impact on anthropogenic emissions reductions. However, many of these technologies are not widely implemented, and I believe that if there was a stronger relationship between engineers and policy advisors, we could begin to bridge this disconnect.”

In addition to their learning opportunities, Herbst Fellows receive a $500 scholarship, attend four guest-speaker events, and present at the Herbst Fellowship Colloquium, where they will present their semester-long project findings. They will also publish a profile of their work in the spring issue of Colorado Engineer Magazine.

Learn more about the Herbst Fellowship

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