They exists don't get me wrong but you know plenty of engineers don't care or bother with more simple things like recycling, keeping themselfs in shape, working on their own mental health etc. etc.
There are plenty fish in the ocean which do not care or just never thought about the implications.
In an ideal world, engineers would be perfectly ethical. But, you know, said hyperbolically, sociopaths can be engineers too. You should not induce from your own values to people in general.
Even apart from people without any values.. most engineers don’t hang out on HN, and don’t care much about global scale politics. They care about things that affect them in a very immediate way - family wellbeing, friends, coworkers, and how to pay the bills. I think many don’t infer how much of an impact their actions actually have, since they are „only spokes in the wheel“.
While it may be a problem that people „unthinkingly do what they are told to do“, I don‘t think requiring engineers to take an ethics class will fix that.
What it does is give people the tools to properly articulate thoughts they are already having. It won‘t make someone an activist who just doesn‘t care.
There are people who can do engineering done without feeling proud or particular care about ethics. I've seen those at uni. Looking at IT through the money lens and no personal projects, no dev work outside of study, no books that are not absolutely necessary etc.
It's only a very small minority of engineers who do. Unless you're a PE and you get to sign off on large development projects, there's no real accountability.
No matter how much teeth a governing body has, it's always going to be gun shy about denying people their livelihood. They're only going to go after the most egregious and flagrant problems. As long as the transgressions are mild, they pose no real danger to those who want to violate whatever ethics code are in place.
Sadly it's not enough for 99% of engineers to refuse to work on an unethical technology, or even 99.99%
Personally I don't work on advertising/tracking, anything highly polluting, weapons technology, high-interest loans, scams and scam-adjacent tech, and so on.
But there are enough engineers without such concerns to keep the snooping firms, the missile firms, and the payday loan firms in business.
Honestly, a big part of it is the lack of ethics training that engineers receive. Far too many engineers have a, "The problem is fun/interesting, that's all the further I'm going to think about it. The implications of what I'm working on are not my department." We need to start thinking more about what we're building, how it's going to affect the world, and how it can be misused.
They exists don't get me wrong but you know plenty of engineers don't care or bother with more simple things like recycling, keeping themselfs in shape, working on their own mental health etc. etc.
There are plenty fish in the ocean which do not care or just never thought about the implications.
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