Dear reader,
Fall 2023. What an exciting time to be in engineering education!
We all have been preaching our entire careers, be it months or decades, that engineering students should be scaffolded to develop themselves as more responsible engineers. We, in ethics, took our time at the comfortable sidelines giving intelligent ethical comments to NASA’s Challenger engineers, Volkswagen software developers, or our local ecosystem partners. And suddenly, we find ourselves in the middle of a global debate on generative AI and its widespread effect, also impacting our daily lives in engineering ethics education.
It seems that nobody in the entire world really knows what to do. In this newsletter, including this introduction, we get this state-of-the-art: exploratory and cautious philosophical analyses of how ambiguity, global justice, virtue theories, integrity, narratives, plausible nonsense, and engineering responsibility can add to the debate. Some contributions go a step further and already reflect on the impact on educational aspects such as assessment.
But the debate is still very open! How can we, as engineering ethics educators and researchers, and this time from within, co-generate morality and influence innovations for the better? How can we influence our universities and their ecosystems to be socially responsible? How will we generate and redesign engineering ethics education so that this super-fast developing technology of generative AI is a constructive tool instead of a threat for students to learn important things, such as being critical and designing constructive values in this very AI innovations? And more and more, student involvement will not be an exotic choice of a few enthusiasts, but a necessary part of a process to involve how they see learning and use their technical skills to answer the ever-changing situation.
