When I graduated as an Engineer, I swore an oath. I still remember one value that gets tested from time to time is to remember my work is for the betterment of the human condition, not only the perfection of machines. This has guided me through some difficult choices.
I’ve been told plenty of times that such a future is implausible. And I grant that our future may look a lot more like The Orville than Star Trek. But from an engineering, public health, and social perspective it seems that both of those visions have more similarities than differences. I accept that the individual work most of us do don’t directly build that future alone, but someone up-thread was quoting “E Pluribus Unum” and that’s how we get there.
(Auto-correct wished that to be “E Pluribus Ubuntu,” but I’ve always suspected LCARS is a lot more like BSD, Arch or Gentoo.)
And so what that it's implausible and quite possible unattainable as well? We may never get there, but getting there was never the point - the point is to be better than we were yesterday, and the day before, and so on.
Even if the chance of that was 99.9999%, the only morally defensible attitude would still be to devote all our energy to survive, expand, improve, and make human civilization more robust. As fast as possible.
Canadian engineering schools do a ceremony and oath designed by Rudyard Kipling. It has some serious gravitas and leaves a real impression on young minds.
The Kipling oath isn't phrased that way so it probably wasn't a Canadian school, but it does have a similar intent.
I'm not Canadian, but I took some engineering classes and these oaths and rings were brought up when discussing ethics. Funnily enough we were told they were forged from the material of a collapsed bridge as a reminder to not build shitty bridges, but according to the article that's a myth.
Before moving to Ireland, Canada was our #1 option. I started some research on what would I need to have my Brazilian degree validated so I could take the oath and be accepted into the EIC.
It's called FEI, which translates to College of Industrial Engineering. It's in Brazil, on a (mostly industrial, and uncannily rainy) city called São Bernardo do Campo.
