Engineers seen as unable to make moral decisions

from the who-else-is-even-paying-attention? dept.
From a Newsweek article on MSNBC on the coming age of cyborgs: "Who, then, can speak on moral issues? Certainly not the engineers. Ellen Ullman, a former computer programmer and the author of the 1997 book Close to the Machine: Technology and Its Discontents, says that 'the problem is not the technology, which in any event canít be stopped. The problem is that engineers are making decisions for the rest of us.' Programmers are hired guns, she says, and rarely understand in a nuanced way their clientsí actual work. They are, she says, the last people 'to understand what is an acceptable risk.' " CP: In Foresight's experience, programmers and engineers are far more attentive to ethical issues in technology than members of other professions.