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Postindustrial societies are characterized by complex technological objects and systems. The publics therein are increasingly reliant on engineers to take public welfare into account when designing and maintaining these objects and systems and raise awareness when public welfare is threatened. The training engineers receive in their engineering undergraduate education is thus expected to foster their sense of responsibility to public welfare, but such training may be absent or insufficient. In this paper, we draw on a survey of 120 employed engineers in the US to assess the extent to which they received formal public responsibility training in their undergraduate education and to assess the relationships between this training and their response to one of four randomly assigned ethical dilemmas. We find that engineers who reported receiving training in public welfare responsibilities as undergraduate students felt better prepared to address public welfare issues than those who had not received such training. Individuals with training in public welfare responsibilities were less likely to identify the ethical dilemma as irrelevant to their work, indicate that such dilemmas happen all the time, be uncomfortable reporting the issue, and believe that their colleagues might respect them less if they report. These findings have implications for improving engineering ethics education and ethical conduct trainings within engineering practice more broadly.
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Left on their Own: Confronting Absences of AI Ethics Training among Engineering Master’s Students
Although development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has been underway for decades, the acceleration of AI capabilities and rapid expansion of user access in the past few years has elicited public excitement as well as alarm. Leaders in government and academia, as well as members of the public, are recognizing the critical need for the ethical production and management of AI. As a result, society is placing immense trust in engineering undergraduate and graduate programs to train future developers of AI in their ethical and public welfare responsibilities. In this paper, we investigate whether engineering master’s students believe they receive the training they need from their educational curricula to negotiate this complex ethical landscape. The goal of the broader project is to understand how engineering students become public welfare “watchdogs”; i.e., how they learn to recognize and respond to their public welfare responsibilities. As part of this project, we conducted in-depth interviews with 62 electrical and computer engineering master’s students at a large public university about their educational experiences and understanding of engineers’ professional responsibilities, including those related specifically to AI technologies. This paper asks, (1) do engineering master’s students see potential dangers of AI related to how the technologies are developed, used, or possibly misused? (2) Do they feel equipped to handle the challenges of these technologies and respond ethically when faced with difficult situations? (3) Do they hold their engineering educators accountable for training them in ethical concerns around AI? We find that although some engineering master’s students see exciting possibilities of AI, most are deeply concerned about the ethical and public welfare issues that accompany its advancement and deployment. While some students feel equipped to handle these challenges, the majority feel unprepared to manage these complex situations in their professional work. Additionally, students reported that the ethical development and application of technologies like AI is often not included in curricula or are viewed as “soft skills” that are not as important as “technical” knowledge. Although some students we interviewed shared the sense of apathy toward these topics that they see from their engineering program, most were eager to receive more training in AI ethics. These results underscore the pressing need for engineering education programs, including graduate programs, to integrate comprehensive ethics, public responsibility, and whistleblower training within their curricula to ensure that the engineers of tomorrow are well-equipped to address the novel ethical dilemmas of AI that are likely to arise in the coming years.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2053046
- PAR ID:
- 10585385
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Society for Engineering Education
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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In the engineering ethics education literature, there has recently been an increasing interest in longitudinal studies of engineering students’ moral development. Understanding how first-year engineering students perceive ethics can provide baseline information critical for understanding their moral development during their subsequent journey in engineering learning. Existing studies have mainly examined how first-year engineering students perceived the structure and elements of ethics curricula, personal ethical beliefs, pregiven ethics scenarios, institutional ethical climates, and particular political ideals (e.g., fairness and political involvement). Complementary to the existing studies, our project surveyed how first-year engineering students perceived public welfare beliefs, examples of (un-)ethical behaviors in engineering, and professional ethical values. Specifically, we adopted part of the well-known instrument developed by Erin Cech to assess how students perceived public welfare beliefs. An important goal of replicating Cech’s work is to examine whether students from a different cohort (i.e., 18 years after the cohort in Cech’s study, and from a more specialized institution than those in Cech’s study) hold different public welfare beliefs. We invite engineering educators to carefully examine how temporality might matter when considering the connections between previously conducted studies with their own ongoing projects. Our survey also asked students to provide an example of unethical behavior in engineering and possible ethical problems they anticipate in their future careers. Finally, we asked students to list three most important values for defining a good engineer. Such a question on professional ethical values responds to a gap in the engineering ethics literature, namely, that engineering students’ perceptions of professional virtues and values are not sufficiently addressed (especially among first-year students). This paper is part of a larger project that compares how students develop moral reasoning and intuition longitudinally across three cultures/countries: the United States, Netherlands, and China. We hope that findings in this paper can be useful for engineering educators to reflect on and design subsequent ethics education programs that are more responsive to students’ backgrounds and needs when they start their first year in engineering programs.more » « less
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This is a full Innovative Practice paper. Engineering professionals are increasingly called on to serve as “public welfare watchdogs” by paying heed to ways in which complex technologies can impact society and intervening when ethical issues arise. Though it is a goal of engineering education to train engineers to recognize and understand their responsibilities to the safety, health, and welfare of the public, research suggests that students are inadequately prepared to address such issues in practice. To address this concern, we designed and piloted a course module for electrical engineering master’s students to help them better address their public welfare responsibilities. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of the course module, including reflection prompts, in-class presentations, breakout group activities, discussion prompts, and post-class assignments. We also present results from our pilot, including a summary of student responses to the reflection and discussion prompts and an overview of students’ course feedback.more » « less
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Abstract BackgroundEngineers are professionally obligated to protect the safety and well‐being of the public impacted by the technologies they design and maintain. In an increasingly complex sociotechnical world, engineering educators and professional institutions have a duty to train engineers in these responsibilities. Purpose/HypothesisThis article asks, where are engineers trained in their public welfare responsibilities, and how effective is this training? We argue that engineers trained in public welfare responsibilities, especially within engineering education, will demonstrate greater understanding of their duty to recognize and respond to public welfare concerns. We expect training in formal engineering classes to be more broadly impactful than training in contexts like work or professional societies. Data/MethodsWe analyze unique survey data from a representative sample of US practicing engineers using descriptive and regression techniques. ResultsConsistent with expectations, engineers who received public welfare responsibility training in engineering classes are more likely than other engineers to understand their responsibilities to protect public health and safety and problem‐solve collectively, to recognize the importance of social consequences and ethical responsibilities in their own jobs, to have noticed ethical issues in their workplace, and to have taken action about an issue that concerned them. Training through other parts of college, workplaces, or professional societies has comparatively little impact. Concerningly, nearly a third of engineers reported never being trained in public welfare responsibilities. ConclusionThese results suggest that training in engineering education can shape engineers' long‐term understanding of their public welfare responsibilities. They underscore the need for these responsibilities to be taught as a core, non‐negotiable part of engineering education.more » « less
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Abstract BackgroundIncreasing engineering students' engagement with public welfare is central to promoting ethical responsibility among engineers and enhancing engineers' capacity to serve the public good. However, little research has investigated how student experience attempts to increase engagement with public welfare concerns. Purpose/HypothesisThis study identifies and analyzes the challenges facing efforts to increase engineering students' engagement with the social and ethical implications of their work through a study of students' experiences at two engineering programs that emphasize public welfare engagement. Design/MethodsWe conducted interviews with engineering students (n= 26) and ethnographic observations of program events, classes, presentations, and social groups (n= 60) at two engineering programs that focus on engagement with public welfare and foreground learning about the social context and social impacts of engineering. We analyzed these data to identify areas in which students experienced challenges integrating considerations of public welfare into their work. ResultsWe found that four main areas where engineering students experienced difficulty engaging with considerations of public welfare: (a) defining and defending their identities as engineers; (b) justifying the value of nontechnical work and relevance to engineering; (c) redefining engineering expertise and integrating community knowledge into projects; and (d) addressing ambiguous questions and ethics. ConclusionsThis work contributes to knowledge about the barriers to increasing students' engagement with issues of public welfare, even when programs encourage such engagement. These findings are relevant to broader efforts to increase concerns for ethics, social responsibility, and public welfare among engineers.more » « less
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