"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.

 

[IRstuff]

"either you design a weapon intended for harm or you don't"

It's not even that straight forward; what do you mean by harm? By calling it a weapon, you automatically infer harm to someone at some time.

Do you avoid work on defensive systems? Even if that leaves your loved ones less protected?

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[moltenmetal]

It's a deep set of questions, with very personal answers. But the old trope that "guns don't kill people- people kill people" is a total cop out. It's a false rationalization which allows some people to work on anything without troubling themselves about the ethical issues behind that work.

I guess it's best to start out at the edges with problems like this, to figure out the limits. The mushy grey middle can then be made a little clearer after the edges are defined.

Designing an object which can be either a weapon or a tool is not an ethical issue. So: no problem with a transport truck, or a kitchen knife, or a baseball bat. Probably also not a problem designing a shotgun or a hunting rifle, unless you don't believe that animals should be killed.

Designing an object which has no legitimate purpose other than killing people is a little harder to justify. A handgun or an assault rifle: it can be in a sense a "tool", i.e. a weapon used by police legitimately for defense against armed assailants, or it can be used as an aggressive weapon. Generally in civil society we give the monopoly on lethal violence to the state, i.e. the police or military. So most places ban military weapons and either ban or put severe restrictions on handguns. If you can be reasonably assured that your weapons will only be legitimately used for defense, the mere fact that these tools can be misused for evil acts wouldn't be sufficient reason for most people to avoid making them. However, some do not trust the state to use its monopoly on lethal force wisely in all cases, and hence have to make the choice to avoid making some of these weapons at all.

OK, so what about landmines? Poison gas? Chemical or nuclear weapons? It seems to me that we've evolved to the point where we're reluctant to give access to certain devastating and/or indiscriminate weapons even to the state. Most people would consider being engaged in the development of such weapons to be unethical today. Some obviously can still find a way to rationalize it.

Things that kill indiscriminately or by accident are the most troubling typically. Landmines kill innocents 50 years after their "legitimate" purpose in war is past. Cigarettes, which are both addictive and the proven cause of serious disease, are in the same category in my book.

Personally I find I am happiest and most secure when my work is as consistent as possible with my values. I ask myself: will this make the world better, or worse? And I try hard not to be a hypocrite about it, though it's easy to fail at that too.

 

[JAE]

A handgun, for many people, is simply something they use for fun, for target use, for competitions, etc. In fact a large percentage of gun owners are in this camp.
Do they have a handgun also for self-defense purposes? Probably....but so do shotgun owners.

So to say that a shotgun or hunting rifle is somehow in a different ethical category than a handgun or "assault rifle" (which there is really no such thing) is not correct or logically consistent.



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[HamburgerHelper]

I don't know how much Alfred Nobel was bothered by the use of his inventions but he was in the least really bothered what was written about him in his premature obituaries. Enough so, he setup an institute for recognizing achievement. Maybe, fewer people would work on weapons and such if their obituaries stated that their life work consisted of making deadlier land mines or whatever.

 

[JNieman]

Yea, I guess if we all were able to predict the future, we'd be able to avoid working on projects that would be perverted into something we object to.

 

[CWB1]

"OK, so what about landmines? Poison gas? Chemical or nuclear weapons?....Some obviously can still find a way to rationalize it."

Yes, some of us have lived firsthand with the use of that technology so rationalization is easy. When you are one of 50 men a helicopter ride up into the mountains of Afghanistan and you wake up to a few hundred Taliban within small arms range you're pretty darn thankful someone thought to set up a few Claymore mines. Similarly, when your squad stumbles into a mustard gas factory in Iraq (wait, WMDs in Iraq, who knew?), you start thinking about what you might be exposed to and are pretty darn thankful someone's back home experimenting with it to develop methods to protect you. JME but I never feared technology, only the folks using it against me because one is inherently neutral, the other both good and evil.

 

[moltenmetal]

A handgun, for many people, is simply something they use for fun, for target use, for competitions, etc. In fact a large percentage of gun owners are in this camp

Lots of fun stuff is illegal or at least tightly regulated because of how easily it can be put to a dangerous prohibited use. Different societies regulate these things differently, in accordance with their values.

When you are one of 50 men a helicopter ride up into the mountains of Afghanistan and you wake up to a few hundred Taliban within small arms range you're pretty darn thankful someone thought to set up a few Claymore mines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty

168 nations are signatories to the ban on antipersonnel land mines. It wasn't without controversy, for the very reason you've mentioned- they can be viewed as incredibly effective protective weapons. Some weapons of war are banned. In the heat of battle, if each soldier was given a button which you could press which would with certainty kill not only the enemy in the field but also every man, woman and child in the enemy nation, there is little doubt that the button would be pressed- not by every soldier, but by some- even though doing so would clearly be a war crime. That's why we don't make those decisions in the heat of battle.

"...stumbles on a mustard gas factory in Iraq..."

Experimenting on methods to protect against chemical weapons is very different from developing new chemical weapons and munitions to deliver them, in the same way that developing armour protection is different than developing armour-piercing munitions or the guns to fire them.

Technology isn't value neutral. Technology and human values definitely do interact.

 

[JohnRBaker]

168 nations are signatories to the ban on antipersonnel land mines.

And which the United States is NOT one of them.

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[rotw]

Ignorance is a blessing. The question is: is it really in the eyes of the beholder ?

Looking backward at my career decisions, taking adverse career choices (example not working for xyz company/managers because of personal values) have often generated a great set back on the immediate term and on a personal level. But on the long run, it turned out that intellectual honesty is powerful for career (and salary) advancement ! it opened new doors that I would not have been able to open my self just by my own will / persistence and determination.

With reference to "personal values" as stated in some posts above..I see a connection with the school / educational model (can argue you its in fact about the culture). At the end, you are on your own. Without a solid references (good professors, educators...) you may sink with the whole ship. I guess the "standard" education teaches you how to deconstruct/deal with things surrounding you of "moderate" complexity. Now things are getting exponentially more complicated and this is plain fact (see demography trends, social interactions, overflow of information, rapid technology evolution, social engineering, etc.). I am wondering if our brain is equipped to handle that level of complexity/threats and break down those things into basic blocks that can be dealt with. Especially when technology is at backbone of this exponential trend. Think of it as a transition from laminar to turbulent flow. Possibly the brain is naturally equipped and has amazing / untapped capabilities but education maybe the cognitive bottleneck. Or should we just keep it "simple stupid"? means rely on sort of heuristics "tested and proved" to navigate our own way through difficult career/life choices. The problem is that the source of these heuristics is typically a legacy from the ancients. It is paradox, but a legacy can be conserved only when it is adapted/tweaked, namely to tackle nowadays problems (not obsolete ones). Some people need to take of that (example: human sciences level, think tanks, etc.), but what are they doing? I think ethical problems will go increasing in the coming years when technology will deploy into new domains and push limits (genetics, artificial intelligence, etc.). I suppose these topics can also potentially do harms societies and individuals.

It requires "guts" for an engineer to turn down a job offer because down the road, the end product is conflicting with personal values(environmental, ethical, etc.). Think about the drug industry for example. My point is that erosion of values on social level does not help (very general statement, I must admit) and once again you are on your own. At the end this is a multi-constrained problem : on top of the basic exercise of landing a job offer and get started learning engineering stuffs and work for a living (this is already not taken for granted); some sort of "personal value filters" is to be applied.

 

[IRstuff]

"A handgun, for many people, is simply something they use for fun..."

Sure, I can see that firing an AR-15 might be "fun," but don't kid yourself that it isn't a "assault rifle," because the military version is nothing but, and the Army itself compares the M16 to the AK47 assault rifle and that the M16 was developed as a direct response to the AK47 and the fact that the previous weapon, the M14, used heavier ammunition, thereby putting US soldiers at a disadvantage by carrying less rounds per unit weight.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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[JNieman]

It's just that "assault rifle" is a silly and arbitrary line that's impossible to define, so it becomes meaningless to anyone trying to apply logic. It's become like the definition of obscenity/pornography as argued over in a US/SCOTUS court case:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

If you've kept up on all the peculiar (and hilarious from the outside) laws against obscene pornography in the UK, you see how quickly things get absurd when trying to nail down laws against the arbitrary.

I think the whole "assault weapon" (there's a difference between assault rifle and assault weapon, and the similarity is used in bait-and-switch quite often, to mislead people) definition is an overblown thing. One time, people focused on whatever made it look different than Grandpas old bolt action rifle. Then people worried about single mag capacity. Then it was having detachable mags at all. Then we're back to demonizing muzzle devices, stocks, and the way you hold it. Then we're back to capacity in addition to trying to blur the difference between semi-automatic and automatic. Meanwhile, people who own belt fed semi-autos are laughing at everyone concentrating on mag capacity.

IMO, it's just dumb. Columbine happened during the AWB using compliant weapons.

And millions of people have used those same weapons every day since that tragic event and no one suffered but the paper and backstops, and some dirt. An incredibly small portion/minority using something for criminal action shouldn't curse the tool. I mean... we still can buy ammonium nitrate fertilizer.

I'm also reasonably sure that no engineer, chemist, or agricultural scientist has ever felt guilt over the invention of various products perverted into disastrous and violent effects. I don't think any reasonable person would point the finger at them for responsibility of the events such as we experienced in Oklahoma City, back then.

End of story.