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This paper considers the cultivation of ethical identities among future engineers and computer scientists, particularly those whose professional practice will extensively intersect with emerging technologies enabled by artificial intelligence (AI). Many current engineering and computer science students will go on to participate in the development and refinement of AI, machine learning, robotics, and related technologies, thereby helping to shape the future directions of these applications. Researchers have demonstrated the actual and potential deleterious effects that these technologies can have on individuals and communities. Together, these trends present a timely opportunity to steer AI and robotic design in directions that confront, or at least do not extend, patterns of discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion. Examining ethics interventions in AI and robotics education may yield insights into challenges and opportunities for cultivating ethical engineers. We present our ongoing research on engineering ethics education, examine how our work is situated with respect to current AI and robotics applications, and discuss a curricular module in “Robot Ethics” that was designed to achieve interdisciplinary learning objectives. Finally, we offer recommendations for more effective engineering ethics education, with a specific focus on emerging technologies.
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Chemical Engineers’ Experiences of Ethics in the Health Products Industry
While ethics education for chemical engineers has been emphasized, potential misalignment between the content of current ethics education and engineers’ actual practice has been pointed out. To help improve ethics education for chemical engineers, this research-to-practice paper presents six descriptions of engineers’ experiences related to ethics. The descriptions were constructed based on in-depth interviews with six chemical engineers who are currently working in the health products industry. As the descriptions provide evidence that ethics is pervasive in chemical engineers’ daily practices, we argue that chemical engineering curriculum should include instruction relative to professional ethics in actual practice. This paper concludes with a discussion on potential ways to utilize these descriptions in ethics education.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1737303
- PAR ID:
- 10312450
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Chemical Engineers’ Experiences of Ethics in the Health Products Industry
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Engineering education researchers have identified a lack of alignment between the complexities of professional engineering contexts and the ways that we train and evaluate the ethical abilities and dispositions of engineers preparing for professional practice. The challenges that engineers face as practitioners are multifaceted, wicked problems situated in unique and varied disciplinary and industry contexts. Understanding the variations in ways of experiencing ethics by practicing engineers in these complex professional contexts will support a better alignment between engineering ethics instruction and what students might experience in professional practice. While there is a need for richer and more contextually-specific ethics training for many areas, our initial focus is the healthcare products industry. Thus, our NSF-funded CCE STEM project will enable us to analyze the alignment of relationships among frameworks for ethics education in engineering and the reality of engineering practice within the health products industry. As a first phase, the project has focused on understanding the different ways in which practicing engineers experience ethical issues in the health products industry using phenomenography, an empirical research methodology for investigating qualitatively different ways people experience a phenomenon. In the second phase, we have analyzed critical incidents that potentially cause the variation in experiencing ethics in practice. The findings of these studies are anticipated to serve as a guidepost for aligning educational strategies and developing effective training for future ethical practitioners. In our paper, we present an overview of the study (background and methods), progress to date, and how we expect the results to inform engineering ethics education and industry ethics training.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36793
