Engineers and Humanity

I am in the midst of an on-again-off-again relationship with Twitter (another topic for another day), so I missed most of this Engineers and Humanities discourse that this post by India in Pixels kicked off.

As an engineer myself (who often draws attention to this fact in any public setting ¹) who works in a function where the humanities are important I am not going to wade into this who does what better discourse.

What I will say is that if we look around (and throughout history, for that matter) we will see many examples of where Engineers can do better engineering if they had a deeper understanding of the humanities.

Here’s an example from the 2024-05-09 edition of Data and Society’s newsletter:

How Car Tracking Can Enable Domestic Abuse Technology has created new avenues for abusive partners to control, monitor, and continue to abuse their victims. While the use of Apple AirTags by stalkers and abusers is fairly well-known, internet-connected cars can also be used for tracking, without a driver’s knowledge. As Khari Johnson reports for CalMatters and The Markup, “a person with remote access to a vehicle via smartphone app can turn a car on or off, record video, lock or unlock the doors, and track a car in real time or see where the car has been in the past.” Johnson unpacks a trio of bills California lawmakers are considering to protect domestic violence survivors from tech-enabled violence. California appears to be the only state considering such legislation.

In the rush to data-fy and app-ify everything, we don’t consider, strongly enough, the potential for abuse of these systems.

If nothing else, one hopes that it makes them more empathetic (and they - for examples, as founders of companies, don’t get triggered because a chatbot used gender-neutral pronouns to refer to them). You know, more human.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

There is more to be said about which of these are a product a oversight, and which are a product of complicity.