The Big Questions of Engineering
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The document discusses the importance of engineers considering the social and ethical implications when building technology platforms and algorithms. It notes that technologies reflect the biases of their creators and can shape human behavior. Engineers must think beyond technical problems to consider who the technology will serve, what behaviors it might incentivize in users, and whether it will expand people's minds or just show them what they already like. When addressing challenges like harassment, engineers' thinking on free speech and human nature also comes into play. The document advocates developing informed views on philosophy, power structures, and ethics to properly contextualize this important work.
The Big Questions of Engineering
- 2. In 2005, the late writer David Foster Wallace mentioned in his commencement speech that fish spend their lives not even knowing what water is. They are naively unaware of the ocean that permits their existence, and the currents that carry them. The most important education we can receive, Wallace goes on to explain, “isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” Wallace asserts that the core concept of meta-cognition, of examining and editing is that we choose to contemplate.
- 3. Technology products and services are built by humans who build their biases and flawed thinking right into those products and services—which in turn shapes human behavior and society, sometimes to a frightening degree. As much as code and computation and data can feel as if they are mechanistically neutral, they are not.
- 4. Those who studied engineering may focus on problem-solving in the technical domain, and prefer to see the world through the lens of equations, axioms, and lines of code. There is indeed beauty and elegance in well-formulated optimization problems, tidy mathematical proofs, clever time- and space-efficient algorithms to some extent.
- 5. When building a platform, engineers need to simultaneously define what it should be, whom it would serve, and what behaviors they wanted to incentivize amongst their users. They are no longer operating in a world circumscribed by lesson plans, problem sets and programming assignments, and intended course outcomes. They are not only building the product, but also simultaneously defining what it should be, whom it would serve, what behaviors they wanted to incentivize amongst our users, what kind of community it would become, and what kind of value they hope to create in the world.
- 6. Engineers' thinking around anti-harassment design would also intersect a great deal with their thinking on free speech and moderation. This requires pondering the philosophical question of whether people are by default good or bad. If people were mostly good, then they would design the product around the idea that they could trust users, with controls for rolling back the actions of bad actors in the exceptional cases.
- 7. There may also be a need for a debate on the implications for an open discourse. If there is a trust in users by default, there might be a tendency toward an open and free platform, believing not only in users, but also in positive community norms and the ability to shape those norms through engineering and design.
- 8. When designing a platform, engineers must also take into account the algorithms powering the respective homefeeds: the streams of content presented to users upon initial login, the default views pushed to users. It seems simple enough to want to show users “good” content when they open up an app.
- 9. Yet, what makes for good content? Is the goal to help users to discover new ideas and expand their intellectual and creative horizons? Or to show them exactly the sort of content that they know they already like? Or, most easily measurable, to show them the content they’re most likely to click on and share, and that will make them spend the most time on the service?
- 10. Given the importance of these questions, one needs to learn how to think critically about the world we live in and how to engage with it. One needs to absorb lessons about how to identify and interrogate privilege, power structures, structural inequality, and injustice. In order to respond to these questions, one also needs to develop informed opinions on philosophy and morality. Even more than all of that, these are worthwhile thoughts to fill one's mind with—that all of the engineering work would be contextualized by such subjects.
- 11. Each of us can choose to learn, to read, to talk to people, to travel, and to engage intellectually and ethically. We may all do so in order to acknowledge the full complexity and wonder of the world we live in, and be thoughtful in designing the future of it.