Engineering Ethics: Crash Course Engineering #27
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 มิ.ย. 2024
- We’ve talked about many important concepts for engineers, but today we’re going to discuss a hugely important one that you might not even realize is an engineering concept: ethics. We’ll talk about what a Code of Ethics is. We’ll explore engineering ethics and the ethical theories of utilitarianism, rights ethics, and duty ethics. We’ll also take a look at a few different real life examples of ethical problems in engineering.
Crash Course Engineering is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios: • All PBS Digital Studio...
Check out Origin of Everything: / @pbsorigins
***
RESOURCES:
www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduct...
www.merriam-webster.com/dicti...
www.nspe.org/resources/ethics...
www.asce.org/question-of-ethi...
www.asce.org/question-of-ethi...
www.asce.org/code-of-ethics/
plato.stanford.edu/entries/ut...
onlinemasters.ohio.edu/blog/u...
www.raeng.org.uk/policy/engin...
interestingengineering.com/un...
***
Crash Course is on Patreon! You can support us directly by signing up at / crashcourse
Thanks to the following Patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:
Sam Buck, Mark Brouwer, Jennifer French Lee, Brandon Westmoreland, dorsey, Indika Siriwardena, James Hughes, Kenneth F Penttinen, Trevin Beattie, Satya Ridhima Parvathaneni, Erika & Alexa Saur, Glenn Elliott, Justin Zingsheim, Jessica Wode, Eric Prestemon, Kathrin Benoit, Tom Trval, Jason Saslow, Nathan Taylor, Brian Thomas Gossett, Khaled El Shalakany, SR Foxley, Sam Ferguson, Yasenia Cruz, Eric Koslow, Caleb Weeks, Tim Curwick, D.A. Noe, Shawn Arnold, Malcolm Callis, Advait Shinde, William McGraw, Andrei Krishkevich, Rachel Bright, Kathy & Tim Philip, Jirat, Ian Dundore
--
Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?
Facebook - / youtubecrashcourse
Twitter - / thecrashcourse
Tumblr - / thecrashcourse
Support Crash Course on Patreon: / crashcourse
CC Kids: / crashcoursekids
Ethics are so seldom taught or even discussed in Engineering, yet it is critical to always think about. Thank you for bringing it to the forefront.
Because ethics are a grey area and they always get abused by someone with an agenda. It used to be that the religious right abused ethics to stifle scientific research they opposed but now it's the left using ethics to push their own agenda. I hate all of them.
So true. I did electrical/mechanical and never in any classes did ethics come up.
@No Comment As is relevant to the Professional Practice of Engineering, one thing engineers have to be aware of is fraud (from people who are not qualified in the field) passing themselves off as qualified. Along these same lines Engineers often must approve drawings and calculations of designs, and spot tampering with these designs should it come up.
Engineering is a lot more than what you make it out to be.
this is not true at all imo, I think talking about ethics is more a hobby than actually useful. The only important sentence to know is "Don't hurt other people" or "hurt others as less as possible" everything else just derives of this sentence
I took a class in Engineering Ethics is an elective while getting my BSEEE. I also took one in Engineering and the Environment.
This reminds me of a lecture I had when I was a physics undergrad. It was an odd lecture in our Thermodynamics and structure of mater course. Our lecturer stood in front of us and began lecturing on several structural engineering failures (chiefly the dehaviland comet and an under inspected railway in England) and I will remember the speech he gave at the end It went something like "as physicists you will be faced with points in your life where you will faced with opposition to doing what is scientifically right by powerful interests both political and/or industrial. When this happens I hope you act in the right way because these people who issue these demands will very rarely be held to account but you will. Not just by any investigations but by yourself and by your fellows in your field of work. I hope you make the right choice because you will have to live with it otherwise and maybe more importantly others may not."
tbf if you're an electrical engineer you still shouldn't be missing with the wires in building. That's an electricians job.
Good point
a correction for the example at 2:00; the failure wasn't due to the rod, the top rod has exactly the same strain as it would have in the original design and this is one reason it was signed off. what didn't have the same strain was the joint between the rod and the upper deck; since that join now supported both decks rather than just the upper deck.
Which rods again? Like the top or the bottom with the joint.
@@user-zo3wy4we3t I think they mean that it broke at the joint, and that the rod itself didn't snap. I believe they were talking about where the top rod connects to the upper walkway.
This.
IIRC they also changed the the deck's support beam to have welds at the top and bottom right where the rod goes through instead of a full box frame, which is cheaper and easier but made total failure even more likely.
@@Mr_Wallet *I read something similiar, but I don't know how much credence to give it. It depends what kind of welds they were. Designed and fabricated properly, they would've been fine, since weld metal is typically stronger than the pieces it attaches. I was, however, just reminded that the original design load was lower than required by the local building code, even before the mistake reduced its strength by half."
I like how you speak realistically. "When we 'screw up', we need to learn from it." Thanks for keeping it real.
I only watch watch this series because there uploading it so can you answer me this dumb question I know the pink rod now had to hold the first floor and the blue rod but didn't the pink need to hold that floor before anyway
@@innoxtechnology138 : A different commenter named Saimons posted this elsewhere: "A correction for the example at 2:00; the failure wasn't due to the rod, the top rod has exactly the same strain as it would have in the original design and this is one reason it was signed off. what didn't have the same strain was the joint between the rod and the upper deck; since that join now supported both decks rather than just the upper deck."
Define 'screw up'
@@jasoncarto did you watch the video?
@@ScrapPalletMan
Is that a requirement to get a definition?
I remember watching Superstore Collapse, which covered the collapse of Sampoong Dept Store in South Korea. While the engineering shortcomings didn't go unnoticed (some did), the management ignored the calls for proper inspection procedures and pressed for reduction in construction cost. The lack of ethics in one parameter is usually correlated to the lack of ethics in other parameters, mostly on the business side.
With that being said, I do truly fear the future where people do not consider ethics as one of the priorities and only go after profit or personal glory, blinding us from doing what is right and possibly jeopardizing the safety of general public and themselves in long run.
FlyingKoreanMinja you must get the ppwer and bring others to the power to achieve this ethical goal. :) . Mongol power.
I'm watching this for the first time a year after it was posted and wow. I am in love with her voice.
One engineer I've known for years was in charge of a major civil engineering project that was, as I understand it, contracted through the city who was in charge of hiring the contractors to build the thing. Though the engineer thought it was a bad idea, the city had to go for the lowest bidding contractor, who was only able to bid that low because they intended to cut corners to save money; if the contractors had been screened before selecting one, the lowest bidder wouldn't have gotten it. The low-bidding contractor during the actual project proceeded to cut corners--despite the engineer being very exacting over what they were *supposed* to do--and, lo and behold, things went pear-shaped and the damages were significant and costly. The project went on hold indefinitely as the ensuing lawsuits took place where everyone involved got dragged into the blame game. Thankfully the engineer's foresight in going into way more detail in the specifications than normal ended up saving his and his firm's butts, since he could demonstrably show he wasn't at fault, but the slogging through the whole mess was a headache and a half that could have been avoided if the people deciding who to hire had made their decision on both merit and money instead of just the latter.
Thrilled to see crash course covering engineering ethics! I try to highlight AI ethics on my channel, but as we learn here, mistakes are bound to happen, and handling them well is yet another skill that AI developers could stand to improve upon.
Slight error in there... The force (tension) carried by the upper rod (or part thereof) was the same in both cases. The force doubled on the fastening at the bottom of the top rod. Sorry, I'm just a pedant.
It's not being pedantic in this case, that is the very reason the engineer didn't redesign the system, he didn't see how it changed things.
Correction - The Oring on the Challenger booster did not fail due to an issue with the oring itself but the fact that NASA decided to launch when it was too cold for the oring to do it's job. The booster had NEVER been tested that cold, and the specifications for the booster did not allow for a launch that cold. Ultimately NASA launch control killed those people not the Engineers.
When you don't know anything about engineering and you're watching this for fun:)
When you studied engineering in a university and you're watching this for fun:)
or spelling
Not bad though its like highschool engineering
Haha i watch smart stuff for fun gee im sooo smart
Smart now useful later.
Nicely explained and love her talking manner and body language. So professional.
*No no no no no. The script has made the same mistake as the Hyatt Regency walkway design engineer! The tension rod was always supposed to support both walkways. The problem was that the revised connection detail passed the load from the lower walkway through the HOLLOW BEAM and through its connection to the upper rod rather than directly through a continuous single rod (which was still a bad design, because it couldn't be physically put together as shown on paper, hence the revision). The top rod was fine, but its connection to the hollow beam section was exposed to roughly twice as much load as originally designed for, and it was torn out of the wall of the hollow beam. That's the textbook version, anyway. There were probably some other mistakes, too.*
*Ad hoc illustration for the layman: Imagine a vertical meter stick punched straight through two paper towel roll tubes, with one near the middle of the stick and one near the bottom, and glued to the tubes where it is punched through. Imagine what would happen if you pulled hard on the ends of the meter stick. Now imagine the meter stick is sawed in half right below the first tube, punched back through it a few centimeters away from the first hole, and again glued in place. Now what happens if you pull hard on the ends of the stick?*
*It should be noted that Thought Cafe's animation looked pretty correct in this case in spite of the script. Some of their other depictions of structural behavior in this series have been unintentionally misleading. Which is understandable. Professional animators can't also be professional-everything-elses, and most people don't have the budget to just faithfully draw every single object based on a real-world model, so unintentional impossibilities always creep in from the artist's imagination. (Stone masonry ceilings, bridges, and lintels set in a historical context but imagined by an artist who grew up in a land of steel and reinforced concrete structures are HUGE offenders.) But it's also unfortunate. Accurate pictures are key to understanding engineering concepts.*
Nobody cares tho. The main idea is that they messed up during the construction that's it
@@nathan-qp7de It matters as it is not only messed up construction, it was already bound for failure from the moment the revised plan was formed due to the engineer's inattention to detail. The fact that this video misattributed the failure in the script clearly shows that people always make mistakes and engineers should check their work as the lives of others are at risk.
@@lugiarboy well as you said, people do make mistakes. That is why it shouldn't be a big deal if this one TH-cam video out of the thousands this channel has create had 1 factual error. Nobody life is at stake from the creation of this video, and I doubt anyone would take notes on construction from this. I agree with you that the engineers made a massive mistake, but that was already stated in the video and therefore there was no need to discredit the people that created this educational video for their nonprofit organization.
It's better to overdesign a structure than underdesign
Just wrote an engineering exam on safety and loss managment (next weeks episode) and used the Chalager Disaster as on of the case study to study!! I can't escape it hahah
The upper rod was going to hold the weight of both floors in both designs. The actual difference was in the force supported by the nuts. The nuts in the design change need to support two floors and the lower rods, the nuts in the first design only need to support the second floor.
Important note for this: the design change still actually met the normal weight requirements of the walkways, the party on the day it failed put the hotel over the occupancy limit, meaning the original design had enough factor of safety for all situations but the change did leave it open to fail only under this situation: massive bangers.
These ethics should be applied to everyone, whether or not they work in an influential career.
Crash course should do a series on law!
Thank you. From Institute of Engineering, Nepal.
When engineering was a subject you hated but you watch and enjoy it
I remember well that day leaving the FIT Solar Lab and walking to get lunch as I thought the Challenger wouldn't go up in the cold weather. I was surprised to see it ascending and then... :( You just kept looking for something to come out of the cloud... I don't understand why many think doctors have more pressure than engineers, for like them the lives of others are in our hands. Sometimes many lives e.g. Titanic, the Comet Jet, Bohpal, ...
Well before we dealt with anything like reduction ratios, stress concentrations, margins of safety, or thermal efficiency, my whole freshman class crowded into the auditorium for a lecture on ethics. It can never be overstated that peoples' lives and livelihoods depend on the quality of our work. For all the disasters that occur due to things beyond our control, it is painfully frustrating when we allow disasters like the Hyatt and Challenger to take place and their causes were well within our knowledge and control. As we build the vehicles, buildings, and networks that advance our society, we always have to remember our due diligence and to accept nothing short of excellence.
I think this is the best series done by crash course so far. Thank you.
"Consequentialism isn't good enough, we need... utilitarianism!" Except utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism.
Pfhorrest both?
And?
@@LukeSumIpsePatremTe And if something isn't good enough, that implies that a form of that something is, by virtue of being that something, still not good enough?
Pfhorrest Furthermore, the reason she said “utilitarianism” was better than consequentialism was because it was about being “useful to the most people”. That’s actually still consequentialism, not utilitarianism. If by “useful” she means “produces the most pleasure with the least pain”, then it’s utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is fundamentally hedonistic.
@@JM-us3fr definition of utilitarianism by google: the doctrine that actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority
Dont have webster :(
I am a believer in engineering! The mechanical kind. Do what you can
not an engineer, but this is beautiful!
Good to know
Im 16 years old and going to build an ultralight aircraft around 50kg. I will make a electric motor with copper wires and run it with dc power supply. I will use under cambered aerofoi and rectangular wing. I will design a pulley system for control surfaces. There will be some calculations with Cl-Ct-Cm
All I need is a carpenter.
Thank you CrashCourse, very cool
Kim Jong-un
YOU’RE MY DADDY
Do you have crash course series on Canadian engineering law and professional liability?
Thanks Pharah
*Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?*
Discover Your Awesomeness not yet. But its reality. We got to learn to survive. Mwhahaha
All this foes out the window when you don't have the time to investigate all possible problems and have a boss that only cares about money...
It should be noted that utilitarianism is a branch of consequentialism
As stated before, Ethics are seldom taught or discussed in Engineering. In real industry and even in Academia it is more often than you would expect not complied. The goal of Engineering is to make money and that is what industries are about. Ethics maybe come in 10th place, after Safety, Problem Solving, Environmental Protection etc etc.
Ethics are Like a glass of water everyone want to drink but nobody's ever giving in today's world
Ethics: The art of smashing someones head in with a bike lock and getting away with it. (Eric Clanton. Professor of philosophy and ethics. Berkley).
A dream combo
Crash Course GEOLOGY please
next subject : ethics in computer science
It might be worth mentioning that a sub optimal (used O Rings) design was chosen in the first place because of politics (congressmen wanted money to be spent in their district).
🅰️ : truth prevails!
whats an ethics
3:11 unless you’re a traffic engineer
It require more in India
If only politicians followed these ethics
NO PLEASE, CHECK YOUR SCRIPT, the rods don't take more load, it's the connections.
The rods carried the exact same load in both design cases. Therefore the rods itself were correctly designed to the correct sizing to carry the loads intended
The problem there is the joints/connection of the top walkway with the two rods. The connection to the upper rod carried double loading, not the rod itself.
If 100 people still don't understand I'll make a short video explaining it in layman's terms.
I know this might seem small/useless correction to a crash course video. BUT any error, no matter it's magnitude, is an error. Small errors can cause the worse accidents imaginable.
(Facts must be told correctly, else I will hear some uninformed person convinced that those poles were too small, and even after proper engineering explanation, they would still not believe the truth.)
Awesome!
This makes me wonder, is it ethical to work on robotics and AI which you know will cost vast numbers of jobs, like a vending machine that automates a fast food restaurant.
I'd say yes, as long as you contribute to employment retraining and relocation for the people who previously served in the roles you're replacing.
What's unethical is to deny people food shelter medical care and other necessities of life in a world full of robot driven abundance just because rich people don't need their labor anymore. But that's not engineering ethics, that's just regular old ethics ethics.
Is it ethical to work on a printing press when it will cost vast numbers of jobs, like scribes who duplicate manuscripts? Is it ethical to work on motor vehicles when it will cost vast numbers of jobs, like people making leather bridles and stirrups and the people in the streets cleaning up horse dung?
The argument isn't new. It has existed as long as technological advancement has existed. And somehow people still have jobs to this day. And they will continue to do so. Enough scare mongering.
The engineer in charge of the Hyatt ONLY got a 3 year suspension?! For killing 116 people? WTF. He should have gotten 30 years in prison at the very least. That's total negligence.
Glad this don't have an effect toward my morale compass
Video about social engineering plzzzzz
If you engineer something on the first try, it actually isn’t good because you don’t know if it’s the optimal way.
Safir should I use a model after calculations then if able a testing site? Then I build it?
Bom Mcjigger
What are you looking to build?
But you sell it and make money.
Safir if i build a house
Safir or a teepee
We need a crash course Uk government and politics please
Can you make series on great scientist bio from ancient to modern
1:44 This is like TH-cam Edu's second favorite cautionary tale, just after Galloping Gertie.
Banned from a society for 3 years? He should have been charged with manslaughter
Absolutely NOT.
He should not have signed off on documents that he didnt personally check. But it is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE to criminalize professional mistakes where the person has the best intention
Thats Why Bridges Collapse in India!
This is the first video I've watched in this series, and the speaker is great but the editing is downright weird. The jump cuts between different angles of her face while she is speaking is very distracting.
There's an episode of 99% Invisible on ethics and prison engineering. (Does the designer have a duty to the inmates _separately_ to the institution?)
Not Applicable in the State of Maine, ;)
Here it's another means to monopolize business and drive social manipulation.
Suspended for 3 years! What an injustice! The engineers should have been criminally liable and suspended for life.
I'd like to agree, but there must be a good reason as to why it isn't like this. Maybe it would be too dangerous to make something as prone to be politically influenced as ethics, punished by law.
In other words, I think ethical and technical issues are being separated the same way as the state and the church because of similar reasons.
The rationale is that if the punishment for errors is too severe, engineers who are responsible for errors will be less likely to admit to errors and/or will try to fix errors in secret without going through proper procedures, decreasing safety/reliability. It’s only when an engineer demonstrates chronic disregard for ethics that they are barred from practice.
Contrary to popular opinion, the goal of the legal system should be rehabilitation, not punishment. Punishment doesn’t solve anything for the future.
@@Antenox Well, that makes more sense than my theory, thanks for the input.
Sounds like a great idea on the surface, but could you imagine the consequence of destroying the lives of everyone who ever made a mistake on the job? The programmers that programmed the self-driving car software that malfunctioned and caused a pedestrian to be hit? Sue them into oblivion and make sure they never work again! Release a software update with a bug in it that causes a hospital to experience a computer crash that may endanger patients? Fire the whole lot of those terrible software engineers and make sure they never work again! Release a car with a faulty part that you find out after people are driving thousands of them on the roads after tens of thousands of miles and you get reports of some fatal accidents that happened when the part unexpectedly failed? Don't just recall and fix the part and learn. You better make sure you destroy each and every one of those engineer's lives while you are at it!
And don't get me started on how many people at Boeing should be jailed right now because their angle of attack sensors appear to be problematic on their new planes and the protocol for when they malfunction wasn't emphasized enough in training.
Pretty soon you wouldn't have an engineering industry left.
There is a difference between deliberately negligent or criminal behavior (fraud, deliberately undercutting safety or building standards and lying about it, etc), and legitimate accident or misjudgment.
*While there is definitely a point at which negligence becomes criminal, you can't criminalize all mistakes. Especially honest mistakes. The fact is that mistakes happen, and if those mistakes are made by a person with significant responsibilities, people could die. It's important to recognize those consequences and proceed accordingly, but we also don't throw people in jail for, say, under-cooking burgers at a fast food restaurant. If the penalties for mistakes made by people with actual responsibility were too severe, then no rational person would ever want to design a bridge or perform surgery or run a city. So, either those things would simply not get done, or they would only be done by IRRATIONAL people. Great, right? Structural engineers are already a pretty risk-averse bunch; we don't need them to be even more terrified of lawyers than they already are. In any case, a lot of ASCE's ethics hearings have to do with actual bad people who give bribes to win multi-million-dollar contracts or try to ruin the careers of coworkers they don't get along with using libel.*
*A big hole in ASCE's code of ethics in the clause about Service With Competence, though. Due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, it can be super-hard for an engineer to know when their experience is inadequate for a project.*
Doesn't sound like she's from ethics. London, maybe.
Next talk about Social Engineering. and modern propaganda :D
Only 3 years? His mistake killed over 100 people!!!
forking shirtballs :) not in the philosophy playlist
give me answers now!
dear crash course please dont just put links for your sources, thank you
Utilitarianism is a terrible ethics, especially when engineers get a hold of it and think it holds special meaning because it uses math.
Yess
Attractive girl
A code of ethics is important for People to have.
give answers now. 🤣😂🤣😂
Ethics is too subjective to be a reliable foundation.
Mhm
Most of this, (4,6,8) is ignored of you're a weapons engineer
She is so beautiful. And intelligent ofc
Who cares for ethics
In Indian engg colleges they teach u pass the exams
Crash course philosophy? 😞
Already exists as a full course sequence
Elon Musk is a good model right ? right.... ?
....right.....?
Right........?
All we learned from this video is a bunch of arbitrary rules with no standard as to why these should be our ethics. She said in the beginning of the video we need a standard to go by... But never gave the standard!
Life is reduced to absurdity without the Christian God!
"The fear of the Lord is the BEGINNING of knowledge..." Proverbs 1:7
Life is absurd with the Christian "god".
So where in early Christian writings are the ethical standards that apply to engineering?
@@robertmcgann5881 Probably somewhere in between the thing about wearing mixed fabrics and boiling a goat in its mothers milk.
@@Voidsworn your ignorance of Biblical hermeneutics is showing lol
@@RichiePGD Your twisted limbs due to hermeneutical backflips and contortions is showing.
Kills 114 people by negligence, get 3 year vacation. Nice.
Steals a sandwich or smokes weed for personal pleasure or is caught in possession, gets 20 years in prison. Genius.
3 years of not being able to make a living followed by a sullied reputation that may prevent you from ever working in the field again? And all because you made one mistake on the job. Yeah, SO unfair.
Steals, and smokes an illegal substance, both of which the person knows ahead of time are crimes and chooses to do it anyway, and suffers the consequences? Well, yeah, we can quibble with the details (I'm guessing 20 years implicates it wasn't a first offense, but I don't know what specific case you are basing this on), but that person done f'ed up and did so deliberately and with forethought. So yeah, doesn't seem quite as far out of whack to me as you make it sound.
Hey look, an ethics discussion!
@@BTheBlindRef Had the duty and training to do the calculations and determine something would fail... We punish truck drivers excessively for accidents when its not their fault and yet not the people we are trusting with the buildings we spend much of our lives in?
Interesting that laws are to be obeyed simply because not doing so is "criminal" but causing deaths in a way not addressed by law is okay.
BRJ You can chose to base your morality on laws, politics or bibles or whatever you want. I chose to base it on my conscience. And I find non-violent crimes way down the list compared to killing a lot of people because of negligence. Killing a cyclist with your car because you were on the phone also gets way less punishment than possessing narcotics or prostitution in most countries. Some laws are, sadly, just outdated.
Professional mistakes should NOT be criminalized. His error was signing off on plans he didnt personally check. But a suspension from the license is a big deal.
@@brianhack5806 No it should NOT be addressed. We should NOT be punishing truck drivers for what is not their fault
😘 I’d marry her
She's beautiful 😍😍 😍
In a capitalist economy where businessmen make the rules, the only code of ethis that mattes is "The money is always right." Ergo, you can never truly trust anyone under capitalism.
That's a fast way to go out of business. Turns out trust is worth a lot of money, hence the power of brand.
Bring back John Green plz.. these new hosts are unwatchable :/
Without the 10 Commandments and Jesus' salvific grace, ethics is just a race to the bottom. Everything becomes relative and, eventually, the biggest gun rules.
The meek shall inherit the Earth.
Lol
However, there's nothing in the Bible about engineering ethics. Actually I don't think there's anything about engineering at all so why should it apply?
@@robertmcgann5881 Well, let's see. There's an Arc, there're fortresses. There's a Temple (a few times). You're bordering on non sequitur.
@@lstein8670 Oh, come on, now, Leo. Use human words. What kind of actual background in ethics do you have so we can have an interesting conversation? Or are you a typical lo-info lib relying on cheap, shallow emotion rather than reason?
Those are objects. Nothing about the engineering required to build them. Nothing about the practices used to build them and the considerations mentioned in this episode.