"Engineering Authoritarianism" 12

[MartinLe]

Hey all,

I came across this short text that I find interesting enough to want it widely read:

https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/12/05/engineering-authoritarianism/

Interesting bits:

Consider first, the disturbing fact that engineers are vastly overrepresented in extremist groups of all stripes: from neo-nazis to jihadists, engineering is the most common educational background of right-wing extremists. Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, the authors of a book on the subject found that relative to their prevalence in any given nation, engineers are vastly over-represented in violent right-wing extremist groups. Left-wing extremist groups that advocate or support violent means, on the other hand, have no engineers amongst their ranks and are instead made up of people with backgrounds in the social sciences and humanities.

Imagine if medical doctors, instead of taking the Hippocratic Oath that says, in part, “do no harm”, instead took an oath to never knowingly expose their employer to malpractice suits? No one, patients included, wants to be involved in malpractice but the change in allegiance should be clear: we want doctors to be first and foremost concerned with their patients’ well-being and their hosting institutions should be directed toward supporting that concern. Why should engineers be any different? Why are there no oaths to build things that cause harm to fellow humans? Why are there no licenses to be revoked if an engineer knowingly and consistently builds things that do great harm? These seem like common sense requests until you look at the major employers of engineering graduates: military contractors, resource extraction companies, and the governments that own those militaries and resources.

I was struggling a bit with the second part: On one hand, the kind of choice they hope more engineers make - not work in arms production or some resource extraction - is one I made myself. OTOH it would be weird to codify this in a semester long course on ethics. But practicing to think through the consequences of the work we do would be a good idea.

 

[Dinosaur]

I appreciate the many cogent observations about the ridicules article. I hope you will enjoy my own humor ...

... then engineers should let others design the things that will harm people.

My particular favorite is the humor that anyone who doesn't appreciate what engineers are doing for them should refuse to partake of the technology engineers have brought them.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Gee, I guess I'm glad that my 14 years of 'hard engineering' (not the last 35 selling software) was dedicated to the design and production of automated machinery for producing baked goods, i.e. bread, rolls, pies and cakes as well as the occasional cracker, cookie and bagel.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[TheTick]

I once met Albert Speer's grand-nephew. Looks just like his uncle.

I was in the navy nuclear power school in Orlando. As I was walking to night study, I saw a sailor on the smoking pad and without thinking I came to a complete stop and stared for a moment. (Imagine how you would react if you saw Hitler or bin Laden on the street!)

He sees my reaction and invites me over. "You know who I look like, don't you?", he said. Then I saw his name tag: "Speer". I almost pooped a brick.

 

[monkeydog]

Ohhh John,
I don't know how you lived with yourself designing and fabricating machinery that would not only lead people to an early death due to consumption of all those carbs and sugar snacks, but you made machines that would make those death traps even faster!
Ohhh the insanity!

 

[JohnRBaker]

Yea, one bakery line we built and installed in Edison, New Jersey produced 40,000 'Big Mac' and 'Quarter-Pounder' buns per hour for McDonald's, and that just supplied a portion of the New York metropolitan area. Production lines like that were operated more like a 'factory' than a 'bakery'.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[IRstuff]

Even in the case of munitions, one could argue that their intent, for us good guys, is to prevent harm to us or our allies.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

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[MartinLe]

All of us have a say in wherer we work, and for whom. Not a totally free choice because we need to put food on our tables, but as engineers we are pretty well qualified and have more of a pick where we work than others.

So we have the option to look at possible employers and se if we really want to contribute to their business.

So all of us in arms production must IMO face the question "Who is your employer selling to, where do the things you design end up, to what ends are they used, are you fine with that?"

My guess is, the usual answer would be:"I just design, the rest is up the sales/management/lawmakers" or in other words: "Not my department"



as a p.s. for my post above,
example 3: Bunch of people in IT vow to not work on databases that can be used to identify Muslims in the US:

http://neveragain.tech/

 

[CWB1]

Please define "arms production" for us. Most of those killed and injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts on both sides have been victims of IEDs. Accounting for reality, should we need worry about working for a fertilizer producer or cell phone manufacturer? How about the RC car, plane, and copter manufacturers whose products are often used to deliver them? The challenge of modern warfare is that it is very unconventional, small arms and missiles account for a relatively small percentage of the damage done, thus making the suggested ethical questions rather difficult.

Regarding example #3, the database the signatories have allowed tabloid media to worry them about about has existed for decades and several of the companies they proudly signed by their name are regular key contributors.

 

[JohnRBaker]

As I alluded to in an earlier post, these are the consequences and characteristics of being involved in asymmetrical warfare; we lack the ability to recognize what's relevant until it's too late.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[HamburgerHelper]

You know. Maybe, these are all engineers who have had a bad run of gantt charters.

 

[IRstuff]

Asymmetrical warfare has been a constant for many centuries. A pikeman and his friends can take down a heavily armored knight. Knights had their heyday, as did main battle tanks (MBTs). One of last wave of IEDs involved making explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), which originated as a high-tech defeat mechanism for MBTs, as found in Hellfires, but have since then become the IED of choice, where copper plates can be banged out in a garage, in quantities, backed with C4 or somesuch, and voila, instant EFP.

The US started its history with asymmetrical warfare as well, with guerilla tactics against a conventional British army, steeped in tradition of mass on mass battles.

Someone asked about arms factories; at the height of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, wireless actuators, including doorbells and others, were used to detonate IEDs, so there's that. Up until recently, it's still been the case that it's people that kill people; machines only do what their operators make them do. Atomic fission and fusion could be used to provide energy, or to kill people; it's solely at the mercy of the owner or operator. Fukushima Dai Ichi was clearly intended to help people, but it wound up killing, or will kill, thousands of people.

The only way that people will stop killing or hurting other people is if they're all dead to start with.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

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[MartinLe]

CWB1 raises a tough question about dual use products.

The far easier question is about the bombs Saudi Arabia drops in Yemen, or Syria & Russia drop on Syrians, or the tanks Turkey uses to level kurdish towns, or the small arms that are the main killers in most conflicts: Continue to work on these, or walk away?

 

[IRstuff]

It's unclear to me whether there's actually anything non-military that isn't "dual-use." A butcher knife can be used to cut meat, or cut people. Water sustains us, or can drown us. Drones can be used to survey earthquake damage, or destroy houses.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[MacGyverS2000]

To IR's point...

Laughter can kill. Love can smother to death.

Dan - Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[moltenmetal]

Sure, the thing doesn't do the killing, and the dose makes the poison. However, it's obvious that some tools greatly facilitate the killing- of multiples, from a comfortable distance...

Technology isn't inherently value neutral. The mere fact that you can kill someone with a cliff or a rock or a bucket of water doesn't change that fact.

People's work should, as much as possible, be consistent with their values, with as little rationalization as possible.

 

[JAE]

Definitely a tough ethics issue - the WWII atomic bombs on Japan could be argued that they saved more lives than killed.

https://www.prageru.com/courses/history/was-it-wrong-drop-atom-bomb-japan

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[ImminentCollapse]

Another extremist used a truck to kill scores of innocents. Did the engineers consider that in their design of the vehicle? Where do you draw the line in your moralistic hierarchy? You don't own Smith & Wesson stock, but what about their suppliers? Coke has vending machines at Smith & Wesson facilities, oh the humanity. The lines get blurry pretty quick, and as mentioned above, making your own choices is fine, condemning and judging others is more problematic.

IC

 

[IRstuff]

Killing for the sake of killing is separable from killing in war. No one gets arrested and convicted for "normal" acts on the battlefield, although, there's apparently some reluctance to use weapons that cause excessive pain or suffering, but "clean" deaths and maiming is apparently OK. So, clearly, purpose is a critical factor in the decision process; if the purpose is beyond a certain threshold, wherever that might be, then the engineer must make that hard decision. Knowingly manufacturing mustard gas would seem to be generally conceded to be over that threshold.

But, that's a pretty simple and pristine decision. Is developing the full-motion-video (FMV) sensor for a Global Hawk over a normal person's threshold? The Hellfire was designed and built as part of the West's weaponry for defending against the perceived Soviet threat during the depths of the Cold War. However, many of the sensor chips used in many current weapon systems were designed for use in general purpose cameras. Sony, being a Japanese company, is ostensibly not supposed to sell their products for the purposes of building weapons, yet, their imaging chips do find their way into military systems. So, how does the Songy design engineer or factory worker deal with that reality? And, can they, given that anything electronic, such as FPGAs, GPUs, which have 99.99% commercial applicability, can and are being used in weapon systems. We are currently in a de facto, undeclared war against an asymmetric protagonist that we mostly dodged for nearly 2 centuries, but are now in their crosshairs for all foreseeable futures. And, this war is not carried out as traditional battlefield engagements, but more as assassinations, either directed or indiscriminate. Which raises the question of how far you are willing to go to protect your families and loved ones, which is a very distinct difference than the abstract protection of families through the development of weapons for the battlefield, like the M1 Abrams, as compared to the FMV sensor on the Global Hawk being used to target Al Qaeda or ISIS leaders.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

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[canwesteng]

The line seems awfully easy to draw in the sand - either you design a weapon intended for harm or you don't. You can't extend any moral responsibility to the engineer of some product that isn't meant to cause harm if it is (ie the Sony FMVs). Whether you think weapons design is immoral or not is another question though.

 

[CWB1]

Given the Star Wars thread I would submit - Which is immoral, the engineer working within the defense industry to ensure it remains ethical or the engineer who blindly deems it immoral, leaving it to potentially unethical folks?

At its core, professional ethics along with every major religion teaches that if you can act to prevent wrongdoing you are obligated to do so.