Engineering Education Must Also Focus on Social Aspects
In the course of his studies, every engineer encounters – and attempts to solve – the travelling salesman problem. In essence, this is an optimisation challenge that involves helping an itinerant salesman visit a series of towns by covering as short a distance as possible, and without visiting any town twice.
What i
s truly fascinating about this decades-old puzzle is the clash between the utter simplicity of its formulation, and the sheer complexity of identifying the solution, especially when considering a large number of towns. Beyond the headaches this problem has caused engineering students, it has spawned considerable innovation in the fields of discrete optimisation and programming. On these rest the well-oiled supply chains, delivery services and manufacturing processes so essential to our lives today.
Although no educator will deny the elegance and importance of the travelling salesman problem, it runs the risk of being the overriding paradigm that courses through an engineer’s educational experience – one that prizes, above all else, efficiency, resource minimisation, and speed.
Certainly, salesmen should cover as much ground as possible, and with the least distance expended (especially in the interest of minimising carbon emissions). However, even as students continue to grapple with the intricacies of this travelling salesman-constraint optimisation quandary, engineering education needs to be balanced by a growing focus on the human and social aspects of the landscape in which engineers operate.
Bear in mind that in 2018, our proverbial salesman need not actually travel, and that even if he does, it would not be to sell products or services. After all, the wonders of connectivity have liberated salesmen from having to cover any ground at all. Drones can deliver products, sensors can collect data, and apps can communicate presence.
Nevertheless, the salesman should and must travel so as to appreciate the contours of the areas he is serving and more crucially, to build social capital with the people constituting these communities. He must interact with them to understand their traditions, norms and values, and to grasp what binds them, so as to en- gender a sense of trust between his company and the community. Better yet, he should visit each town more than once to nurture these links he has forged, and to empathise with their struggles!
Critically therefore, we need to sensitise our next generation of engineers and technologists to the social, cultural and political dimensions that exist in defiance of the rational, Cartesian, calculated planning undergirding technological systems. Consider how Amazon’s AI (artificial intelligence) recruiting tool taught itself to reject women candidates because the historical data on which it was based was stacked against women to begin with.
Or mull over how Uber drivers in London and New York colluded to simultaneously log out of the app, thereby tricking the system into offering surge pricing. As such incidents amply demonstrate, neat algorithmic logic is often upended by the messy realities of society.
Furthermore, the ethical conundrums emerging around AI, machine learning and the growing shift towards Big Data necessitate greater social awareness among the technologists who are forging and moulding such digital and physical infrastructures. If history teaches us anything, it is that engineers and innovators often hold overly optimistic views of the impact of their inventions, without fully grasping their unintended consequences. For instance, Facebook was conceived over a decade ago on the premise that it would be a powerful platform to bring humanity and communities together. Of late though, this social network has fuelled intense polarisation among people in many countries around the globe, and become a key node in the spread of online disinformation.
ETHICAL PRACTICES AND PRINCIPLES
Felicitously, institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are investing heav- ily in research and education on the ethical and responsible development of technology. Similarly, Mozilla’s Responsible Computer Science Challenge will grant up to US$3.5 million to educators who creatively infuse computer science education with a deeper focus on ethical practices and principles. At the Singapore University of Technology and Design, 22 per cent of the engineering and architecture students’ curriculum is dedicated to social sciences and humanities electives. Such strategic commitments can help ensure that our engineers of tomorrow do not have blind trust in the wizardries of technology, but can think critically about what the future holds if the humanity of our humble salesman takes the back seat.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has made a call for Singapore to expand its pool of engineering talent by heightening the profession’s appeal. Several initiatives have been introduced including the revamp of salary structures and the introduction of the Public Service Commission’s engineering scholarship. However, we must pay attention not only to the quantity but also the quality of engineers, by ensuring that they benefit from a well-rounded educational experience.
Hence, even as we drill into our engineering students the virtues of resource optimisation, we must also vest them with a broad grounding in the humanities and social sciences. Equipped with this wider perspective, they can be more conscious of the ethos, logos, and pathos that influence how people interact with each other, and with the technologies that pervade their built environment.
Time-honoured values such as inclusiveness, fairness, accountability, transparency and trust must not be laid at the altar of efficiency, where engineers seek only to minimise the paths we take. Indeed, the travelling salesman requires more than just a clever GPS, he needs exposure to disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, philosophy, psychology and sociology to fully comprehend what makes people and communities throb.
And one last thing – since our need for diversity in the technology sector has never been more pressing, how about we solve the travel- ling salesman problem instead?
❚ The writers are both faculty members at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. Professor Lim Sun Sun is head of humanities, arts and social sciences and a Nominated Member of Parliament. Roland Bouffanais is professor of engineering and director of graduate studies.
