The New Shamans? – Part 2
By: Nicholas Hill
Chief Executive Officer
6th December 2017
We can view the engineer today as someone who has special powers to control or influence the spirits of technology; a guardian of the magic of electronics and software; someone who can be looked to for a vision of what can be achieved if the spirits are willing, and someone in whom we must have faith that the spirits will be successfully harnessed and the vision delivered (on time and to budget).
I signed off from the first part of this blog wondering what it means for the engineer whose job it is to provide the technology under the hood, for companies who wish to bring new and evolving products to market, when the end user knows (and perhaps cares) less and less about how it all works. This engineer is in a position of considerable power and influence and needs to use that power both wisely and ethically.
Of course, we can use this power for ‘good’, or not, as we choose. There have always been ethical considerations for engineers, with some being uncomfortable working in certain fields, motivated by aspirations, such as working for peaceful ends or protecting the environment. Most people will have a red line somewhere about the intended applications of the technology they are working on, depending on their personal beliefs. However, the ethical aspect that I wanted to highlight is different to this. In a way, it is about who the engineer is actually working for, in the widest sense. If I buy a product, I might reasonably expect its designers to be ‘on my side’. Is that a reasonable assumption? It feels to me that, increasingly, it is not.
With technology becoming so obscure to the lay person, it is becoming easier to create the proverbial ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’. At the headline news end of the scale, we have seen engineers working for an automotive manufacturer designing ‘features’ into the engine management system to enable the vehicle to pass emission tests, even though the vehicle would be way over the limits in normal road driving.
As an engineering task, exploiting the way that emissions tests were performed wouldn’t have been hard once the well-specified test procedure had been studied carefully. Sadly, a collection of individuals, including the engineers involved, decided that implementing this feature was the right thing to do. Who was the beneficiary of this feature? Clearly, it’s the vehicle manufacturer and not you, the end customer.
For a much less high-profile but more pervasive case example, think of the engineers in the smartphone industry who are working with psychologists in the field of ‘behaviour design’. That desire to keep looking at your phone is not simply due to your lack of willpower. You are responding to a carefully developed rewards system that has been built into applications with the express purpose of keeping you on the phone. In receiving these rewards, such as incoming photos, messages, ‘likes’, and other notifications, we are given a dopamine-induced kick, enticing us to stay engaged.
And because they do not occur on a fixed schedule, we are encouraged to keep looking just in case. More time on the phone means more likelihood of exposure to advertising. You, the end user, are not the beneficiary of this ‘feature’ either. Concentration, once lost, takes a long time to recover, so the loss of productivity through these constant distractions is enormous. And yet many engineers are engaged in developing and refining (I hesitate to say improving) such features. Perhaps it is not surprising that the loaded term ‘WMDs’ has been appropriated in some quarters to refer to Wireless Mobile Devices.
The VW case created a major upheaval, with both the company and whole emissions testing regime under close scrutiny as well as massed legal actions, multiple resignations, and one of the engineers responsible in jail. The damage to trust meant that the discussion quickly moved on to wondering which other manufacturers had been doing the same. In all cases, as technology gets more and more sophisticated, it will become easier over time to incorporate features that work against the end user.
Whether it is the car that they drive, their smartphone, a voice-activated personal assistant or any sort of connected appliance, these users may wish to evaluate for themselves whether the product they are purchasing is likely to be working for their benefit, or for the benefit of the company selling the product, or for someone else entirely. Unfortunately, the complexity and obscurity of the technology involved means that they are not in a position to make this assessment. After all, even the professionals conducting government emissions testing were fooled.
So the end user can only rely on trust and, if this trend continues, they may start to lose faith in the engineers and technologists who are designing the products that they buy. And that would not be a good thing for the engineering profession, which is having a hard enough time with its image already. As engineers, we all have a responsibility to our employers, but we should bear in mind that we also have an ethical responsibility to the users of everything that we design.
Try this test: if the feature that I am working on right now, and the reason for its existence, was printed on the product label rather than buried in a black box, would the customer still buy the product?
We can view the engineer today as someone who has special powers to control or influence the spirits of technology; a guardian of the magic of electronics and software; someone who can be looked to for a vision of what can be achieved if the spirits are willing, and someone in whom we must have faith that the spirits will be successfully harnessed and the vision delivered (on time and to budget).
I signed off from the first part of this blog wondering what it means for the engineer whose job it is to provide the technology under the hood, for companies who wish to bring new and evolving products to market, when the end user knows (and perhaps cares) less and less about how it all works. This engineer is in a position of considerable power and influence and needs to use that power both wisely and ethically.
Of course, we can use this power for ‘good’, or not, as we choose. There have always been ethical considerations for engineers, with some being uncomfortable working in certain fields, motivated by aspirations, such as working for peaceful ends or protecting the environment. Most people will have a red line somewhere about the intended applications of the technology they are working on, depending on their personal beliefs. However, the ethical aspect that I wanted to highlight is different to this. In a way, it is about who the engineer is actually working for, in the widest sense. If I buy a product, I might reasonably expect its designers to be ‘on my side’. Is that a reasonable assumption? It feels to me that, increasingly, it is not.
With technology becoming so obscure to the lay person, it is becoming easier to create the proverbial ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’. At the headline news end of the scale, we have seen engineers working for an automotive manufacturer designing ‘features’ into the engine management system to enable the vehicle to pass emission tests, even though the vehicle would be way over the limits in normal road driving.
As an engineering task, exploiting the way that emissions tests were performed wouldn’t have been hard once the well-specified test procedure had been studied carefully. Sadly, a collection of individuals, including the engineers involved, decided that implementing this feature was the right thing to do. Who was the beneficiary of this feature? Clearly, it’s the vehicle manufacturer and not you, the end customer.
For a much less high-profile but more pervasive case example, think of the engineers in the smartphone industry who are working with psychologists in the field of ‘behaviour design’. That desire to keep looking at your phone is not simply due to your lack of willpower. You are responding to a carefully developed rewards system that has been built into applications with the express purpose of keeping you on the phone. In receiving these rewards, such as incoming photos, messages, ‘likes’, and other notifications we are given a dopamine-induced kick, enticing us to stay engaged.
And because they do not occur on a fixed schedule, we are encouraged to keep looking just in case. More time on the phone means more likelihood of exposure to advertising. You, the end user, are not the beneficiary of this ‘feature’ either. Concentration, once lost, takes a long time to recover, so the loss of productivity through these constant distractions is enormous. And yet many engineers are engaged in developing and refining (I hesitate to say improving) such features. Perhaps it is not surprising that the loaded term ‘WMDs’ has been appropriated in some quarters to refer to Wireless Mobile Devices.
The VW case created a major upheaval, with both the company and whole emissions testing regime under close scrutiny as well as massed legal actions, multiple resignations, and one of the engineers responsible in jail. The damage to trust meant that the discussion quickly moved on to wondering which other manufacturers had been doing the same. In all cases, as technology gets more and more sophisticated, it will become easier over time to incorporate features that work against the end user.
Whether it is the car that they drive, their smartphone, a voice-activated personal assistant or any sort of connected appliance, these users may wish to evaluate for themselves whether the product they are purchasing is likely to be working for their benefit, or for the benefit of the company selling the product, or for someone else entirely. Unfortunately, the complexity and obscurity of the technology involved means that they are not in a position to make this assessment. After all, even the professionals conducting government emissions testing were fooled.
So the end user can only rely on trust and, if this trend continues, they may start to lose faith in the engineers and technologists who are designing the products that they buy. And that would not be a good thing for the engineering profession, which is having a hard enough time with its image already. As engineers, we all have a responsibility to our employers, but we should bear in mind that we also have an ethical responsibility to the users of everything that we design.
Try this test: if the feature that I am working on right now, and the reason for its existence, was printed on the product label rather than buried in a black box, would the customer still buy the product?
