Growing a Culture of Technological Stewardship

Daily headlines stress
the ways modern technologies disclose their most dystopian possibilities; this magazine is replete with examples of innovative technologies that prompt considerations of their unethical applications. Numerous approaches have already been proposed to advance critical thinking about the social, cultural, environmental, and economic implications of tech innovation, such as tech literacy and philosophy of technology. What these intellectual traditions have shown is that while the negative effects of technological innovations may be unprecedented, they can be foreseen, and, more importantly, mitigated through more intentional and skillful engineering. Nevertheless, systematic efforts to address these impacts remain peripheral to the engineering profession, with technological artifacts deemed value-neutral, and intervention often seen as luddite and unenforceable
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. While this situation suggests a need for systemic changes across academic and industry contexts, it also points to an immediate need to address the uptake of critical thinking about the implications of tech innovation within the engineering community.