With great power comes great responsibility. Are you here to improve the world? Do you want to make a change? There's more to changing the world for the better than engineering knowledge. 4TU Centre for Ethics and Technology offers you four lectures that help you think about this responsibility. Attend at least two of them and get a USE point!
Technological Risks | 10:00 - 11:00
dr. Philip Nickel (TU/e, School of Innovation Sciences)
We rely on and through technology in most of our pursuits — but when do we have reason to trust it? In this presentation, moral issues will be discussed that are raised by risks and hazards of technologies, and how engineers can deal with those issues. Furthermore, attention will be paid to the responsibility of engineering for safety.
The Responsibility of Engineers | 11:00 - 12:00
prof. Dr. Anthonie Meijers (TU/e, School of Innovation Sciences)
One of the main differences between science and engineering is that engineering is not just about better understanding the world but also about changing it. Many engineers believe that such change improves, or at least should improve, the world. In this sense engineering is an inherently morally motivated activity. The knowledge and the technology they produce often directly influences the wellbeing of individuals and often affects their choices. This raises serious questions of responsibility, accountability and liability.
Value Sensitive Design | 13:00 - 14:00
dr. Aimée Wynsberghe (TU Delft)
In engineering design often a choice between alternatives in the light of design requirements has to be made. These requirements may conflict with each other. This presentation introduces the approach "Value sensitive design" to explain how you can deal with these conflicts by integrating values (expressed by the design requirements) of ethical importance in a systematic way, so that public values will be accommodated in the design process.
“What would you do or what should you do?” | 14:00- 15:00
dr. Micaela dos Ramos (Director of KIVI. KIVI is the largest professional association of engineers in the Netherlands)
What would you do if you were are an engineer at Volkswagen working on the notorious diesel engines? You are asked to develop software that cheats the permission test on emissions. You did inform your superiors about the effect and the fraud perpetrated. But the work is going on as started. What would you do? Keep objecting? Stop cooperating? Nothing? But if you just change the question a bit to "What should you do?" Would the answers change also?
Register by sending an e-mail to studium.generale@tue.nl.
The presentations will be part of a MOOC (Massice Open Online Course) developed by the 4TU Centre for Ethics and Technology aimed at ethics education for engineers. ethicsandtechnology.eu