Let us now think engineering: an interview with Carl Mitcham

AK: In a survey of startup entrepreneur engineers in Russia, who were asked to range priorities in their work (such as economic rationale, public good, etc.), one of the top answers was “getting things done”.

CM: It is the same in the United States. Engineers describe themselves as “problem-solvers”, not caring too much what the problem might be. This is why teaching engineering ethics is so hard. Ethics is just something stuck on from outside, so engineers just naturally think: “This is not the core of what we do”.

When I made this argument once at a meeting in London, David Blockley, the author of “Engineering: A Very Short Introduction” for Oxford University Press, a person Aristotle might have described as a “great-souled” engineer, argued that I was terribly mistaken and that a core value in engineering is safety. Blockley has also written some basic texts on engineering safety. But while he is obviously to some extent correct, the fact that there is a whole field of engineering called “safety engineering”, and not all the engineers study it, raises questions about its integration across the engineering disciplines. In some sense even safety can seem stuck on from outside. There are engineering projects in which a particular “use and convenience” requires the reduction in concern with safety, as when military engineers have to construct a bridge as quick as possible to enable an attack. Besides, safety would seem to play as important role in medicine as in engineering.

AK: Is there not a contradiction between a common consensus that engineering is a socially embedded activity, which you also have emphasized by speaking of English-speaking engineering, and a universal statement that engineering is always “problem-solving”? Before a problem can be solved, it must be defined.

CM: Yes, but this is the point: Engineers do not themselves define the problems they solve. They are given problems. And they can be given these problems in different ways by different societies in different social contexts. This is precisely what embeds engineering. Engineering does not so much embed itself and constitutes a kind of agency that leaves itself open to being embedded. Normally this takes place not so much individually as socially. Thus there can never be a socially non-embedded engineering although engineering can be analytically conceptualized in a non-embedded manner. It's like language. There is no language as such. There is only English or Russian or German. Yet still we can think conceptually about language as such.

AK: Then there is a very practical (didactical) question of how to integrate a course in engineering ethics into engineering education. Bucciarelli complains that the case-based courses in American technical universities often give simplistic views on decision-making in engineering practices [Bucciarelli, 2008]. In complex cases there is commonly an effort to disentangle the complexities in order to apportion individual responsibilities, which is quite unrealistic in large corporative or governmental R&D projects. Thinking in terms of individual responsibility needs to give way to some sense of distributed responsibility.

CM: Yes, I agree, responsibility is often fuzzy and fluid.

AK: What does this mean for teaching engineering ethics? Can we grasp the social complexities in such a short course? Should it include excursions into sociology, political philosophy, social psychology, organization theory and other disciplines that will make it more contextualized? How can we practically do it?

CM: Li Bocong, a Chinese philosopher of engineering colleague, argues that what engineering ethics should be and what it really is, is the ethics of collaboration and cooperation. That is what actually engineers need to learn: how to work with other people, taking their different interests and perspectives into account, the ethics of working in groups.

Similar to Bucciarelli, Li does not think teaching ethics codes should be the center of engineering ethics education. That is the reason he developed this whole field of sociology of engineering: to understand how engineering projects work. (He further argues that the Chinese term “gongcheng”, usually translated as “engineering”, would be better rendered as “engineering project”.) In any engineering project there are economic factors, limited resources, limited time, the staff you have - some people do not know some things and you need to distribute the tasks to the people who can handle things, all of which means some people will work more than others.

Incidentally, this is precisely why I have argued elsewhere that the most general fundamental principle for engineering ethics, meaning ethics not just for engineers themselves but for them and for all of us who live in an engineered and engineering dependent world, is a duty “plus respicere”, to take more into account.

AK: This question of inequality of knowledge and control and distribution of responsibility at the working place is crucial for sociology of engineering labor, especially for Marxist thought. If we recall the cases from the “Capital”, the engineers there do not represent technology as such, they represent technology in service to capital, and in case of controversy, they naturally take the side of capital, for example, concerning safety conditions [Marx, 1954].

CM: This is both true and important. I am afraid that not many engineers think about it. This subservience to capitalism is un-thematized in their thinking about their lives. At least, English-speaking engineers are just sucked into the capitalist vortex. But I would disagree with Bucciarelli to some extent. If not too artificially constructed, case studies can help students begin to appreciate the complexities of the context in which their engineering is embedded, including the cultural captivity of capitalism. I am just not sure how you could teach it other way.

AK: To do this right, wouldn't it require a preliminary course in history or sociology of engineering and technology?

CM: Yes, any modestly effective engineering ethics curriculum will need to include significant measures of the history and sociology of engineering and technology. But this is an up-hill battle and would require more engineering education reform than is likely, at least in the United States. For years I have argued that if engineers are going to be true professionals then engineering should be a professional degree like medicine or law. In the United States, in order to enter a medical school or a law school a person needs already to have earned an undergraduate degree in some field. History of technology would be an excellent undergraduate degree preparation for a professional engineering degree.

AK: Let us take an example of the historically flexible distinction between the technical and economic rationality. In the beginning of the 20th century, Thorstein Veblen with his technocratic progressivism projected that engineers might eventually emancipate technology from capital. Do you think there is some kind of new wave of this technocratic optimism now?

CM: Perhaps in digital technologies. I think that this is a kind of idea that is reproduced in different media. Look at Google or Facebook - they want to rule the world. But the paradox is that they want to do this to make capital. Google's motto is “Do no evil”, perhaps implicitly admitting their evil abilities. Facebook's motto is “Move fast and break things”. There is clearly a kind of technocratic confidence embedded in the mind sets of these Silicon Valley disrupters. Mark Zuckerberg is a free market fundamentalist who does not want to be regulated by the government because he thinks he can do things better than the government. He wants to use his technology to set his own agenda, probably genuinely believing he can make the world better.

AK: Have we ever witnessed this degree of implicit popularity of technocracy? The gurus of IT (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk) have become role models for a whole generation of computer scientists and software engineers. Is there historical precedence of such a public perception of engineering?

CM: It is an interesting question. Ford and Edison were heroes, Tesla was to some extent, but he was overwhelmed by Edison. John Roebling, the bridge builder, was a public hero.

AK: All of those named were entrepreneurs, right?

CM: Yes, we could call them entrepreneurial engineers or engineer entrepreneurs.

AK: In the English-speaking world we often find the metaphor of “engineering the future”. We are often intuitively using expressions of this kind, such as “social engineering”, “designing one's life”, or “political technologies”. What is your interpretation of this idea of an “engineered future”, what does it mean?

CM: It is always difficult to predict the future; ultimately we have to wait on history to reveal it to us. For me, however, as best I can understand it in the present, it means turning the future into an engineering project. Everything becomes just another problem to be solved in the short term, with the solution inevitably creating another problem, and the cycle is repeated. Engineering, systems engineering, and especially engineering maintenance (an often overlooked dimension of engineering) replace cultivation and craft as the predominant forming, making, and caring activities. Politics is replaced by planning and policy. It is a world in which innovation follows innovation, creative destruction follows creative destruction, stimulated and managed by marketing and advertising. The engineered future includes what Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, called the “engineering of consent”. (This is another dimension of social engineering that has been almost completely ignored but is well studied by Stuart Ewen in a series of important books beginning with “Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture” [Ewen, 2008]). Nevertheless, we cannot at this point know what is going to come forth. An engineering future could take different forms, some perhaps more stable, attractive, flourishing, or consumatory (to adopt a term from John Dewey) than others. Or it might all simply fall apart under the weight of its own complexity. There could also be some kind of widespread reaction or rebellion against it. At this point we simply do not know. The best we can do is to try to stand back and reflect on the mutating turbulence in which we find ourselves.

AK: This leads us to the idea of global capitalism or globalization as convergence. You have been working in China for years. Could you describe your general impression of the Chinese engineering project? Will the process of unification in science, technology and business make it almost indistinguishable from the Western world? Or can there be some strong preservation of difference?

CM: Once again you ask very difficult questions. And I must qualify whatever I say, because my knowledge of China is rather superficial. I am aware, however, that there has been a long debate about modernization in China. In the late 1800s near the end of the Qing Dynasty, when Chinese experienced both the need for modernization to defend themselves against Western imperialism and fears of modernization as threatening their culture, the slogan was “Chinese knowledge for substance, Western knowledge for application”. The New Culture Movement in the 1910s aimed to transform Chinese culture: the new slogan was that Confucius had to be replaced by “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy”.

The triumph of Chinese Communism in 1949 seemed initially to achieve this transformation. But Mao Zedong Thought Communism (and Chinese Communism is not just Communism in China) radically distorted Western notions of both science and democracy. The catastrophic violence of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) might be described as engineering with Maoist characteristics. Although under Mao China developed nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles the massive engineered transformation of the Chinese infrastructure of transport and communications did not begin until 1978 with the Reform and Opening of Deng Xiaoping. China now has more kilometers of high-speed rail transport than the whole rest of the world combined, and with a better safety record than Europe. The metro systems in cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and other cities are some of the best that exist. Beijing is a showcase for postmodern architecture.

The early 2000s, however, saw initiations of a revived interest in traditional Chinese culture, especially in Confucianism but also in Daoism and Buddhism. In 1987 the contemporary philosopher Li Zehou had turned the Qing slogan around to propose “Western knowledge as substance, and Chinese knowledge for application”. Western science and engineering can be decorated with Chinese culture. At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Chairman Hu Jintao promoted the Confu- cian and Daoist values of harmony. To what extent is the contemporary revival of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism able to be integrated with science and engineering remains a question. This is a question that exists in all cultures that are being transformed by technoscience: in Japan, in Russia, in Germany, in France, even in the United States.

Take a concrete case like the Japanese tea ceremony, a ritual traditionally practiced with handmade pottery cups. Can this ceremony be retained with industrially mass produced tea cups? The Japanese philosopher Yanagi Soetsu argues that it cannot, that the ceremony depends on anonymous craft traditions. To what extent is this true or just a nostalgic romanticism? American philosopher Albert Borgmann's distinction between thing and device is one of the most important efforts to engage with such questions. I am not sure about the answers.

AK: We could also ask whether it is possible to differentiate a commitment to some traditional practices, in a grassroots effort to preserve a lifeworld, from localization in marketing.

CM: Yes, there are many distinctions to sort out here. It will take time to do so. We must also recognize the attachments that people feel toward their local cultures, how uncomfortable and disoriented they feel without a distinctive culture that bonds them to others. They seem to need both the distinction and the bond of decoration in order to feel stabilized in their worlds.

There is today some reaction against the modernist building boom in Beijing and some efforts to rebuild some of the old traditional hutongs. Some modern conveniences are introduced. There are no longer public baths that everyone has to share, but the narrow alleyway streets remain, and the rooms are constructed with what looks like the same kind of brick, although of course the brick is now industrially mass produced. To live in a reconstructed hutong is a kind of reaffirmation of being Chinese but with a difference, modernized.

AK: This leads us to the question of philosophical anthropology. The early Industrial Revolution was reflected in the metaphors such as “Man a Machine” by La Mettrie, and now, in the age of the digital revolution, there is a wide-spread metaphor of the mind as a computer. More than just imagining AI as human, this transforms our image of human consciousness into a program. Does this de-human- ize or can it be a new level of human self-realization?

CM: Once again, I am not sure. I think it will take time for us to understand what is happening to us, what we are doing to ourselves with our engineering and re-engineering of the world. The protagonist of Arthur Koestler's novel “Darkness at Noon” (1940) is a Bolschevik arrested during the Great Purge and accused of treason. In the midst of the changes taking place around him, he compares himself to an ape, hanging on the tree and looking down at the newly evolved creatures who stand upright and walk on two legs. He imagines how hard it would be for such an ape to understand the new way of life that is emerging around him. I sometimes ask myself, in my questioning of what is happening around me, am I still just hanging on the trees? Yet it does seem to me that we are reaching a self-destructive point. The big indication of this is what we are doing to the natural world. The fantasy of becoming AI or AI taking over does not take into account that we ultimately remain dependent on a fragile and relatively (not perfectly) stable non-human environment. We are both intentionally and unintentionally destabilizing the larger encompassing world so much that it is hard to see how we are going to survive.