ETHICS-2025 Session B3 – Workshop: Engineering Education for an Ethical Future: Equipping Engineers for Emerging Technologies
This workshop focuses on ethics education with emergent technologies that emphasize the future role of engineers to responsibly innovate, develop, and deploy for various shareholders. Our team of Duke faculty from biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, and electrical & computer engineering have successfully integrated ethics education modules in biotechnology, robotics, automation, and machine learning within technical courses, highlighting the importance of this embedded pedagogy. Participants will reflect on the utopia and dystopic futures (plural) of their field’s emergent technologies and brainstorm strategies to educate engineers on the present dilemmas of deploying technologies with risks and uncertainties while teaching the necessary technical knowledge to excel as innovators. We will discuss all of the strategies we employ in our classroom, from case studies to design fiction, and engage with participating faculty to embed modules such as these in their coursework. Our workshop objectives include: Participants will (1) identify emergent technologies within their engineering discipline that would benefit from a future-casting approach to identify ethical dilemmas, and (2) establish the role of engineering educators to integrate ethical inquiry within technical design and coursework to enhance the professional formation of engineers with ethical foresight in their respective fields.
