I Have Seen the Future! Ethics, Progress, and the Grand Challenges for Engineering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a critique of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s report, Grand Challenges for Engineering, based upon the “technocratic view” of progress as defined by historian Leo Marx and as exemplified by the public works of Robert Moses, including the 1964 World’s Fair, as well as technological determinist narratives on the digital age drawn from contemporary culture. While the so-called Grand Challenges purport to have social aims, a close reading of the document’s overview essay suggests that the technocratic view of progress—which views technology primarily as an end in itself rather than as a means to social progress and fails to explicitly account for engineers’ social and ethical responsibilities—still dominates the thinking of at least some leaders of the engineering profession. This technocratic thinking presents a critical barrier to achieving social justice both within engineering and in the larger world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".