Episode 30: Tech Stewardship (Part 1)

In this episode of Engineering the Future, host Jerome James explores the concept of tech stewardship and its importance in today's engineering landscape. 

He is joined by Mark Abbott, a professional engineer and director of the Engineering Change Lab at the Mars Discovery District in Toronto. Mark discusses the strategies, challenges, and real-world examples of how engineers are taking on the role of stewards to ensure that technology benefits everyone. 

From ethical considerations to sustainability, join us as we delve into how tech stewardship is shaping the future of engineering. 

Transcript

[Start of recorded material 00:00:00]

Jerome James:  This episode of Engineering the Future is brought to you by Cornerstone Law, the official legal partner of OSPE. OSPE members get 30 minutes of free legal advice with a lawyer. If you have a legal inquiry about your license, engineering practice, unpaid invoices, contracts or any questions about construction and engineering law in general, please do not hesitate to contact Cornerstone Law. For more information please visit Cornerstone Law’s website at cornerstone.ca, or call 416-591-2222.

Voiceover:        This podcast is brought to you by OSPE, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, the advocacy body for professional engineers in the engineering community in Ontario.

Jerome James:  Welcome to Engineering the Future, a podcast brought to you by the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers. I am your host Jerome James. 

At the intersection of innovation and responsibility is tech stewardship. On today’s episode we uncover the strategies, challenges and real world examples of how engineers are taking on the role of stewards to ensure that technology benefits us all. From ethical considerations to sustainability, we’ll explore how tech stewardship is shaping the future of engineering. And joining me at this intersection is Mark Abbott, professional engineer and director of the Engineering Change Lab at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, the world’s largest urban innovation hub. For the past seven years Mark has led initiatives that have brought together over 150 organizations and 300-plus influential leaders to advance tech stewardship within the engineering community. 

Mark, welcome to Engineering the Future.

Mark Abbott:    Thanks, Jerome. It’s my pleasure to be here. 

Jerome James:  So let’s just dive right into it. Can you define tech stewardship and explain why it’s essential to today’s engineering technology landscape? 

Mark Abbott:    Yeah. Absolutely. Well, and I’ll start by zooming out a little bit. I would say that, you know, in recent years in particular it’s becoming increasingly clear both the promise of technology but also the perils and the potential pitfalls of technology. And so you look at things like obviously all the conversation around AI and generative AI, this year with the launch of ChatGPT. You look at the increasing conversation around climate change and all of the technological change associated with that. I’d argue there’s actually a larger kind of awakening in society writ large around the nature of our relationship with technology and those promises and potential pitfalls. 

And so it’s within that context that we’re thinking about, you know, the need to be more intentional about how we shape our relationship with technology as a society and right down to the individual level. 

Where that connects to engineering obviously is if you think in a broad sense of engineering as the process of creating technology, then that process is very important in terms of obviously the impacts that technology is having on society. And so, you know, how do we actually, as the people – engineers, as the people who are trained in the engineering process who have the ability to actually create and apply technology, what’s our responsibility and our opportunity to help steward or shape that co-evolution of society with our technologies towards a world we want to see as opposed to one of those dystopian futures we so often see when we go to the movies and watch, you know, stories about the future? 

Jerome James:  Do you find that this concept of tech stewardship has been widely adopted to – are people aware that it’s even a requirement or something that we should be thinking about in today’s technological day and age? 

Mark Abbott:    Again, I think it’s sort of an awakening that’s just starting to happen. What you see a lot of now is people focused on specific challenges associated with technology. You know? Like algorithmic bias or privacy in the digital space. Or it could be around, you know, pollution with nano particles or – there’s a whole range is sort of kind of technological issues. I think the current state of things is we’re seeing those things as sort of disconnected or discreet and separate and trying to address them with policy change or sort of high level kind of top- down approaches. 

All of those – you know, it’s critical to look at each of those issues and to put in place things like policy. I think what’s been missing from the sort of the – that we’re just awakening to is there’s actually this underlying question of how of our ability as a society to steward our relationship with technology writ large, all technology and this kind of like this integrated co-evolution that we have going on and that comes down to a very personal level. Each of us as citizens, as consumers, is shaped by technology but also has an ability to help in our own small way shape technology. And if we happen to be engineers or policymakers or, you know, our various rules in society bring with it extra opportunity and responsibility. And that’s where engineering as a profession, I think, because of our role in the creation of technology, have that, you know, that kind of very unique and extra responsibility and opportunity. 

Jerome James:  OK. So we’re going through this technological awakening as you put it where issues are arising. Some of these challenges are actually being addressed at the tech level, at the IT level in large corporations. What can you point to as some common challenges organizations are facing when they’re trying to implement tech stewardship practices? 

Mark Abbott:    Yeah. And let me relate it to, you know, you asked earlier, you know, what is tech stewardship. So tech stewardship as a professional identity, as a mind-set, and as a behaviour. So it’s really about, you know, if we want to shape the sort of future we want to see. If we want to be intentional about that relationship we’re creating with technology, you know, it’s about – ultimately it comes down to that level of individual behaviour—right?—and, like, the mindsets that drive it. So that’s – tech stewardship is about getting those new mindsets and behaviours and identity out there. 

The three core commitments of tech stewardship, so your question about where the challenges are, I can relate that to the three core commitments of tech stewardship. So the three core commitments are to advance understanding about the nature of technology, to deliberate values so that we’re taking a more sort of – we’re understanding the value tensions of making more intentional decisions. And to actually – I’ll translate that all into practical behaviour. 

So on the first commitment of advanced understanding, it’s incredible how, you know, despite all of our obsession with technology as a society, very few people have actually stopped to think critically about, wait a minute, what is technology? So you get these kind of narrow stereotypes and misconceptions where technology becomes a synonym for digital or new as opposed to the broader way of thinking about technology that you would see sort of potentially in, say, a social science class that was studying the nature of technology in society. So you get this kind of crazy reality where if you ask a lot of engineers, oh, what about technology? They hear IT. They hear computers. They hear only AI. Whereas in a broad sense technology is the means by which humans adapt our environments to meet our needs and wants. So that could be, yes, digital technologies but also physical technologies, biological technologies like CRISPR. Even social technologies. So the first barrier is if we don’t even understand the nature of technology and what’s going on, then, you know, you’re building on a shaky foundation. 

One of the things that comes out of that deeper understanding of technology is disabusing the notion that technology is neutral. Technology is not neutral. Our values shape and are shaped by the technologies we create. The creation process, the engineering process, is inevitably one of kind of navigating different kind of value-based decisions and intentions. So that brings us to the second core commitment of how do we understand that process of how our values are being embedded in the world we’re creating – the physical, digital, biological, you know, technologies that we’re putting out in the world? How are our values embedded in that and how are those technologies in terms shaping us? 

You know, Marshall McLuhan, the famous Canadian, is often credited with the quote, you know, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. Well, what are our tools if not technologies? So we shape our technologies and our technologies shape us. 

And so understanding, you know, how – what are the dominant values of the engineering community? What are my dominant values? And how am I potentially unconsciously embedding those values in the technologies that I’m bringing into the world and then, you know, sort of almost potentially unintentionally forcing a dominant set of values on communities that might not share those values? 

And then the final commitment obviously is how do you actually take all of this into day-to-day practice. So I think right now you have a lot of guidelines and policies around specific technology challenges. But where the bottleneck is OK, well, how do you translate that into the day-to-day work of engineers who are creating and applying technology? 

Voiceover:        We hope you’re enjoying this episode so far. At OSPE we’re here for you, making sure government, media and the public are listening to the voice of engineers. You can learn more at OSPE.on.ca. 

Jerome James:  Exactly. That was going to be my next question. Like, I’m hearing this more expanded idea of technology not just in the digital realm; all different types of engineers are going to be interacting with this, are responsible for this. What kind of mind frame should we be in? How can we contribute to more of an ethical administration or understanding in our own organizations on moving forward with this new-found understanding?

Mark Abbott:    Yeah. Great question. And, you know, if you look at the current kind of system, like, when I graduated engineering back in the ’90s, and still today, we tend to learn sort of the technical work over here and then, like, the professionalism and ethics stuff over here, and we don’t learn how to integrate those two things very well. Right? And then you graduate and there’s no longer an ethics class or a professionalism class. So you just put your head down and do the technical work. Right? Like, that’s such a common story.

You know, in my first career as a consulting engineer, you know, things would bother me, I’d have questions, but no one ever stopped to talk about them. And when we did we didn’t have language and it was really hard so we just kind of, you know, shut up and did the tech, you know, did the next project, did the next kind of design. And so a lot of it is just like actually learning to weave what we call a tech stewardship practice, which is essentially a socioethical reflective practice. Like, while I’m doing my studies, while doing my work, I’m going to pause consciously – you know, maybe once a month, maybe every once every couple weeks – and I’m going to think about what are the questions or tensions that I’m feeling around my work? And I’m going to, you know, connect that practice with others. 

So, like, if I’m trying to – I’m struggling to say, like, something’s bothering me here and I’m not exactly sure what that is, there’s people I can talk to and connect with and frameworks and tools that can help me understand what that tension is. And the essence of tech stewardship practice is noticing those tensions around us and finding both end – what we call both-end opportunities within the tensions. 

Because let’s say like, you know, take a few tech-related examples. Like, around cell phones. You know, I value my privacy; I also value convenience. The way that technology has been, you know, kind of created, the phone and all the apps on it, have mostly been designed to get me to give up my privacy in the sake of convenience. Right? So that’s a tech-related tension. 

If I’m in a, you know, say I’m in a company that’s developing apps or developing cell phones, there are decisions that are being made day to day around the design of that technology that are actually kind of, you know, that are then being, you know, sort of broadcast out in the world. When that technology starts being used it’s creating tensions in all the users—right?—around privacy versus convenience. You know, we shouldn’t accept these trade-offs. There are ways to get the best of both privacy and convenience. If we demand it as consumers, if we find those opportunities as the engineers working in those companies that are creating those technologies. 

Jerome James:  OK. There. But I guess that that’s another tension, right? Because there are individuals in that company that knows what exactly what they’re doing. Right? They know how addictive what’s going on. They know the sociology aspect as well as the tech side of it. Is it up to us as consumers to make ourselves more aware of what is actually happening in an app that is gaining all of my attention after work or, you know, what I’m contributing to in my little piece of a larger project coding per, for example. Yeah. How do we make sure that literacy is up to date? Do more technically minded folks need to take more sociology classes? Or – but you said it, it needs to go beyond school. Should there be a non-technical elective to keep your P.Eng. going forward in this new world where technology is, you know, bridging different siloed industries and disciplines? Is it enough just to be technically proficient these days? 

 I’ve said a lot of things. 

Mark Abbott:    Yeah. Short answer is, in my opinion, it is definitely not enough to be just technically proficient. And let’s zoom out for a second because you were also asking about how can an individual make a difference, right? And tech stewardship obviously, you know, is inspired by the concept of environmental stewardship of the 1960s. Right? In the 60s was when society started to wake up to the nature of our relationship with nature and the environmental movement unfolded. And we know when we think about the environmental movement it’s not just high-level policy; it’s not just organizational decisions; it’s not just individual behaviours; it’s all of it happening kind of, you know, in a complex sort of change. Like, it’s a large, big change. 

And so that’s the way we see tech stewardship too, right? Is right now we’re in a moment where society is starting to awaken to the nature of our relationship with our technologies. And so that broader awakening about the nature of the challenge needs to kind of perpetuate the engineering field, but basically society writ large, and we need to start looking for those opportunities at individual level in our jobs, at a top-level policy level and they have to happen kind of in concert. 

Again the engineering profession, as kind of a unique community within society that’s actually charged with the, you know, the creation process of technology and the application process of technology, we are imparted with these skills through society. We get a chance to study engineering. We get a chance to become professional engineers. We’re given this trust. 

The thing that I think that is becoming clear is right now we’re graduating engineers who haven’t rigorously been sort of challenged to understand the nature of what they’re creating – like, the deeper nature of technology. That’s happening somewhere other on the other side of campus, right? Like, in engineering programs, we’re so focused on the technical knowledge of how to actually create and apply the technology, and that becomes such an over focus, that somewhere on the other side of campus there’s a different group of students who are being trained to think critically about the nature of technology and its relationship with society in philosophy of technology, critical media studies, science technology studies. That group of students almost never mingles with engineers and when they do not only are we speaking a different language; we have a different culture. Like, I went into engineering because I want to get stuff done and you philosophers just want to talk. 

So we have everything we need as a society but it’s siloed. You know? We have the engineers, you know, just coming off and kind of just put your head down like I did in my first career. Put your career head down and just build the next thing; do the next project. And then you have years later the social scientists come along and study all of the things that went wrong and do the sort of study after the fact. With tech stewardship we need this connected practice where people with all these different – that have all these different perspectives and views and values to come together and practice collectively so we can build this muscle of – this societal muscle of stewardship to ensure we don’t wind up in one, you know, living in a black mirror episode or, you know, a Terminator, you know, Matrix kind of future. 

In fact it’s funny how most of our stories of the future are directly or indirectly cautionary tales of us kind of getting our relationship with technology wrong. And yet as a society we continue to invest so much in our ability to create technology. K-to-12 stem programs to get more engineers innovation to turn out more technology. You know, maybe all of that investment if we don’t pair it with an increased investment and stewardship capacity, maybe all we’re doing is accelerating our arrival in one of these dystopian tech futures. 

Jerome James:  That’s a frightening thought. So – [audio ends]

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