Essay Sample on Do Engineers Understand the Consequences of Their Innovations?

Engineering is the broad scientific discipline of understanding, designing, and building structures and machines. But do the people designing and building these structures and machines fully understand the societal consequences of them? In the initial stages of my research, I discovered that some of the companies behind innovations understood the possible consequences but believed the possible profit to be worth it. For example, take Facebook’s recent announcement of Instagram Kids, branded by Facebook as “a version of Instagram that allows people under the age of 13 to safely use Instagram for the first time.” (BuzzFeed News, 2021). Facebook announced the launch of Instagram kids with the full knowledge and abundant research showing that Instagram itself is harmful to young people; “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said a 2019 meeting slide leaked by a Wall Street Journal exposé. (Wall Street Journal, 2021). However, some companies are trying to correct the fallout of their innovations. For example, the process of obtaining metals and rare elements needed for the iPhone has wreaked havoc on natural resources and the environment. According to Business Insider, “The ore, or rocks, from which these elements are obtained are laced with radioactive materials and carcinogens that can leak into the water supply and destroy forests and farmland surrounding the mines” (The Guardian, 2014, as cited in Business Insider, 2018). To counteract some of the environmental devastation caused by their innovation, Apple recently pledged that its supply chain and products would become 100% carbon neutral by 2030, continuing to “increase the use of low carbon and recycled materials in its products, innovate in product recycling, and design products to be as energy efficient as possible” (Apple, 2020). 

However, that still does not get to the heart of my question. After the invention was realized and a mega-corporation had made billions of dollars from it, some research and redress occurred. But I still had not found any sense of awareness at inception. Delving deeper into my research, I found an article exploring the expectations the inventors had for the impact of their respective inventions of the telegraph, phonograph, and telephone. The research abstracted that “inventors have no control over their inventions’ destinies. This led to the conclusion that technological assessment requires a perspective other than focusing upon the wishes and expectations of individuals. Perhaps attempting to discover reasons a technology is used in the ways it is and has the effects that it has would be more heuristic” (Frommer, 1987, p15). I found the previously mentioned article interesting and found a related article that I believe answers my question in the best way. Using the example of the invention and social repercussions of Facebook, the article postulated that, “What becomes increasingly clear with each revelatory news story, is that Zuckerberg – and the leaders and engineers and designers at other tech firms like Google and Twitter – failed to see how an engineering mindset applied to achieve social goals could wreak havoc on society and democracy.” They elaborated that “User experience, or UX, is concerned primarily with how a technical system works for the individual user. UX research asks: Does this meet an individual user’s needs? It is not designed to ask: What does this mean on a broader scale? What are the social consequences of this? Does this meet society’s needs? What are society’s needs?” (Tromble and McGregor, 2019) From this, I concluded that engineers do not understand the societal consequences of their innovations from inception. One of the intrinsic problems is that the nature of engineering and invention is that it does not - and often cannot - see the full scope of the cultural and social fallout it will have.