Taking up the Mantel
Responsible engineering to guide us through what regulation cannot
On March 19, CU Engineering’s Herbst program for Engineering, Ethics, and Society hosted Glen Miller for their Moulakis Lecture Series for Responsible Engineering. Glen Miller is an Instructional Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University with a background in chemical engineering.
Through his teaching and research, Miller helps people to understand and thrive in an evolving sociotechnical world. In particular, his work focuses on engineering ethics as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI) and cyberethics.
The lecture provided students with the opportunity to learn from Miller’s expertise on what responsible engineering is today and how they can embody it moving forward in their careers.
Miller provided students with a philosophical background on why it is useful to understand the role of engineers through a “sociotechnical” understanding of the world, and then illuminated how this understanding allows us to see the limits of regulatory bodies. Miller's talk culminated with a call to action, emphasizing the importance of individual responsibility over passive reliance on regulatory bodies. And that shifting emphasis in this way will help us close today's widening gap between public interest and engineering design.
Miller's argument is grounded on concepts from a variation of phenomenology, a philosophical approach that attempts to describe reality from the lens of human consciousness. Postphenomenology, originally developed by Don Ihde, blends elements of phenomenology and American pragmatism together. It is also referred to as the “philosophy of mediation” because it treats technology as an active participant in our reality as humans, thereby mediating our experiences. Technology mediates, standing between us and our acts in the world and our experiences of it, as a sort of active participant.
Using this view of what technology does, we are led, argues Miller, to conceive of our collective relation to technology as "socio-technical,” and to look at the assemblages of people and things as sociotechnical systems. Miller’s lecture at CU by using a “socio-technical” lens to consider the impacts of the work that engineers do. Using the socio-technical lens makes us