IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 81

Making It Strange:
Disrupting Assumptions
About Technology and
Ethics in Engineering
and Computing
Education
Alexandra Morrison
Humanities Department
Michigan Technological University
Houghton, MI 49931 USA
" What we are familiar with we cease to see. "
-Anaïs Nin [1]
 While the history of technology is rife with
accidents, breaches, and scandals, recent news is
filled with stories that call into question not simply the
actions of individuals or companies but the nature of
the technology itself. Cambridge Analytica's data harvesting
and psychological profiling, Facebook's failure
to prevent election interference via its platform,
and Google's censorship enabling collusion with
authoritarian regimes can all be seen as the moral
failures of malicious or negligent actors, but collectively
they highlight the moral and political status of
a technology-fueled social media universe in which
human data is monetized, information access is controlled
by a tiny circle of opaque private companies,
and algorithmically amplified inflammatory rhetoric
invariably trumps the truth.
In this time of massive growth in the scale and
scope of technological innovations, it is more important
than ever to look critically at the nature of these
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3197274
Date of current version: 16 September 2022.
September 2022
Charles Wallace
College of Computing
Michigan Technological University
Houghton, MI 49931 USA
innovations and to challenge a naïve, techno-utopian
attitude that innovation is synonymous with progress.
Students in engineering and computing programs are
exhorted to " disrupt " the status quo-yet, the ethical
lapses we have mentioned can be traced precisely to
a disruptive, " move fast and break things " approach
to innovation that aims to dethrone existing markets
and values to establish industry dominance [2]. In
such an environment, one thing is not challenged,
questioned, or disrupted: an unreflective attitude that
technological change is inevitable and beneficial.
We are educators tasked with engaging students
in ethical inquiry at an STEM-oriented university in
the United States. Alexandra is a philosopher who
teaches courses in engineering ethics and philosophy
of technology to students across the campus, the
vast majority of whom are in STEM majors. Charles
is a computer scientist who teaches a required
course on social and ethical aspects of computing
for students in computer science and software
engineering degree programs. Despite our different
backgrounds, through conversations about our ethics
courses, we have identified a good deal of overlap
in our goals. We both wish to shake our students
out of easy attitudes about ethics: for instance, the
0278-0097/22©2022 IEEE
81

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/technologysociety_september2023
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