Ethics Reflection
In 2010, a small change in an air-stream in the upper atmosphere caused an incredible heat wave to occur in central-western Russia. For the first time, temperatures in Moscow reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and thousands of people died. The drought that this heat wave caused killed much of the season’s wheat, and to protect the interests of her people, Russia stopped exporting it. Russia is normally the largest global producer of wheat, and many countries depend on it to feed their people, especially countries in the Middle-East and North Africa. When Russia’s wheat shipments stopped coming, the people in these nations revolted in an event that was called the Arab Spring. Governments were overthrown by starving citizens looking for bread, some becoming democracies, others recaptured by different, even more brutal dictators. All of this is to say that small changes can have a multitude of effects, both good and ill. This phenomenon is called the butterfly effect, and it applies to more than just weather. As Engineers, it is our job to design, test, and sell products and solutions to customers around the world. These products will inevitably change people’s lives; we need to ensure that they change people’s lives for the better.
Ethics is an incredibly old field of study, and it aims to answer a vague yet important question: ‘What is right and good?’ There are four different frameworks for ethical thought, and each has a different approach to how they structure their answer. I am not going to go in depth on any of these branches, as I think that choosing the way you consider ethical dilemmas is a deeply personal process, and that you will arrive at valid conclusions no matter which you choose; the important thing is that you have a code with which to answer these questions. In some cases, that code is given to you. As Electrical Engineers, it is expected that we follow the code outlined by the IEEE. We follow this code because, as with all ethical codes, it provides a framework in which we can be certain (or at least, certain beyond a reasonable doubt) that what we are doing will advance our goal as engineers to make the world a better place, and at the very least, not cause harm. This code must be at the center of our decision making process, no matter what the project, no matter who the employer. When we come to an ethical dilemma, we should first make a list of our options. Determine how many reasonable paths forward you have, and what the outcomes of these paths may be. Then compare those paths and their outcomes to our code. Do the outcomes violate any of our standards? If there are paths which do, cross them off of the list. From there, we ought to determine which of the remaining viable paths advance the interests of both the engineering community (Here I am suggesting that the goals of the engineering community are to make the world a better place) and our employers furthest, and choose one of them to pursue. As we learn more about the problem and the solution we are trying to implement, we must constantly re-evaluate our methods and ensure that the requirements set forth by the codes are still being met.
As a class, we discussed several examples in which a group of engineers did not properly apply ethics to their products, either intentionally or by mistake. A lot of these examples such as the film The Social Dilemma and the account of the team responsible for the Amazon Echo have to deal with how a customer’s data is handled. Technology has advanced very rapidly over the past couple of decades, and as such there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the best way to protect people’s privacy while also ethically providing them with services that they want. Our class pretty quickly came to the conclusion that when working with personal data, it is best to give people as many protections as possible. In general, we think it is best to tend on the side of doing less for the customer if it means that they are safer. This goes for everything from Facebook to airplanes.
The three virtues which I think most apply to what we discussed are charity, responsibility, and honesty. Technology changes almost daily, and no one can be expected to be able to keep up with everything that happens in a chaotic world. If engineers attempt to act responsibly, they will be much more likely to find and prevent errors which might leak a person’s private information, or more generally, look before they leap when designing products. If an engineer considers all the implications that something they are creating might have before creating it, he or she can bring these concerns up with his team before too much engineering time goes into a project. If engineers are honest about faults that a device might have, or about their concerns regarding the design of a project, more errors will be caught, and errors that are not caught will be easier to track down and fix. Finally, if engineers always design with charity for all people in mind, they will be loath to create something that makes a few people rich but destroys the lives and homes of others. Our goal is not to get rich, it is to make the world a better place.
I think that the virtues presented in the Virtue Ethics document can be split into two groups; virtues that protect the self and virtues that protect the community. I think that Fidelity, Integrity, and Self Discipline are personal virtues which certainly ought to be applied, but that don’t necessarily protect the community, as they are internal. They protect you and your employer, which again, is important, but unrelated to our discussion.
Ethics are an incredibly important part of our profession, especially now. Technology created without the public in mind can hurt people. If we keep the codes in mind and act with honesty, charity, and responsibility, we will leave the world better than we found it.
Gen. Ed. Reflection
At its very core, engineering is a field about how to solve problems. The vast majority of the problems we learn to solve in school are technical and mathematical, because those languages can be far more exact than any others. That said, an engineering degree awarded in this novel digital era would be incomplete without educating students in the ancient and hallowed arts of navigating a society whose problems change dynamically and esoterically with every passing minute. The Anthropocene has pushed us off of Lovecraft’s island of ignorance with a finality that cannot be denied, and as we voyage further into the seas of infinity, the problems we will be asked to solve as engineers will become more and more dependent on the answers to vague metaphysical questions that were posed in a different age by men who died long before our ancestors even dreamed of us. The bad news is that no one really knows how those problems will look. The good news is that those problems will almost certainly be caused by people, and an education in the humanities teaches us that people never really change. I think that any foray into the humanities will give an engineer the skills they need to engage with the vast amount of human knowledge that has been stored in either history, literature, or art, and so I chose the path that I most enjoy, which is history and philosophy.
I took two 200 level philosophy classes, one on philosophy generally, and the other on the philosophy of diversity. The most valuable skill that comes from philosophy (or at least, the most valuable skill for me) is the ability to critically engage with different view points in a well rounded way. The best example of this is the way that epistemological philosophers (philosophers who study knowledge) have to constantly include safeguards against skepticism in their theories. Due to this, there are two dimensions in every paper. Do I think I can use this idea to comprehensively define what it means to know? Do I think that this idea is structured well enough that a weird goblin man can’t shout something incomprehensible about being a brain in a jar in some other-dimensional basement loudly enough that the rest of the community nods quietly and stops talking to me? The second part is way harder and way more important, and it’s not even close. While this may not seem applicable to engineering, the ability to contextualize a project in as many different situations as you possibly can is a great way to ensure that you have at least the beginnings of an idea about what it means. And perhaps that is the most important reason why the humanities needs to be included in an engineering education. We’re great at making things work, but we also need to be great at understanding what it means for society when those things work.
I took three 400 level history classes, one on Revolutionary France, one on the Ancient origins of Russia (Kievan Rus, Novgorod, Muscovy, the Early Russian Empire, and how those guys handled hanging out in arguably some of the busiest time periods for the eastern european region), and one on Russian Intellectual history (what Russian authors were writing from Catherine the Great’s era into the late Soviet era). I think it’s worth noting that I was about half way through my second Russian History class when Russia invaded Ukraine in the spring of 2022, which really changed the way that we perceived the material being taught. My knowledge of Ancient Russian History has been essential in personally contextualizing the war in terms of the peoples and governments that have occupied the Ukrainian region since 891 A.D. That contextualization process is what makes history worth knowing in the scope of an engineering degree. Allow me to elaborate. Our species has existed genetically as it does now for approximately 300,000 years. All of written history, everything that any of us has ever written down, has taken place in the last 5,000 years. This means that any ancient culture that it is possible to learn about is just people exactly like us who didn’t have as much information about the world as we do. Every piece of literature ever written, every story ever told, every idea ever had, every painting ever painted contains deep within it an inherently human element that all of us can relate to, because it was made by people who are basically us shifted by f(t-s). Furthermore, all of the big problems and hard questions that people throughout history have been wrestling with are incalculably useful to us while we try to solve our own big problems and answer our own hard questions, because we get to see how their decisions turned out. We live in the world they created. We engineer in the world they created, and with the minds they engineered with. We may be blind to the future, because it is huge and complicated and weird, but history is a cane we can use to avoid the pitfalls of the past.
A lot of this essay has been very nebulous and hand-wavy, and I apologize for that. The point is this: our core engineering classes are about how to engineer. Our gen eds are about why we engineer.
Cumulative Reflection
When I reflect on my education at Iowa State, one of the elements which I am most grateful for is how well the curriculum tells a coherent story about electrical engineering. Throughout all four years, our curriculum has built upon itself and flourished into a narrative about how the electromagnetic force can be used to do interesting things and solve hard problems. I have had this experience and perceived my education this way because of well designed labs, ample opportunities to work with professors, and Iowa State’s emphasis on a team focused culture.
The first lab project that I felt really resonated with me was a crossover network that we designed in my circuits and systems class (EE 230 for those familiar with Iowa State). We had spent the previous two weeks learning about filters in class, and then had an additional two weeks to complete a project of our choice that would demonstrate our understanding. My partner and I spent probably a combined total of 35 hours over those two weeks in the lab designing, testing, and redesigning that circuit until we got it to work. My portion of the work was a Sallen-Key low-pass filter that would create a bass sound in the final signal. There is perhaps no feeling greater than spending a lot of time on something and seeing it work in the end. Projects like this are common in Iowa State’s lab courses, and the passion they have inspired in me is nearly as fundamental to my education as the knowledge has been.
Early in my time at Iowa State, I did undergraduate research for Dr. Brian Hornbuckle, who is a professor in the Agronomy Department. I learned the basics of the research mentality while pursuing my project, which was collecting data on the performance of thermo-couples and moisture sensors under different orientations and temperatures of water to determine whether or not those variables could affect the sensor’s output in a way that might skew existing data sets.
In nearly every class I have taken at Iowa State, I have had to work in a group to accomplish a goal. Not only does this make classes more fun, I think that this has prepared me for working in teams in industry, a common theme in all of my jobs to date. Where many universities seem to discourage working with other students, professors at Iowa State nourish team work in their classes, and as a result, I think that we all learn more about the subject matter.
Easy access to industry internships has been an essential part of my education at Iowa State. I have had three internships, and all of them have given me the opportunity to apply what I have learned in class to real life problems. I discuss these internships more in the employment section of my portfolio, but each of them helped refine my goals and determine my career path.
While we did take a class dedicated to ethics, an understanding of how our work affects the world around us has been infused into all of my experiences at Iowa State, both in the classroom and in internships. Engineering can be used to do great harm, and we need to be prepared to avoid that harm both technically and personally. In my classes, multiple times, professors have talked about the dangers of bribery, or how easy it would be to slip into the trap of misrepresenting inconvenient data. We have been prepared to avoid these evils, and focus on building a better world.
Evan Pasero 