22 June 2023
Women in Engineering Day
There are plenty of events for this INWED day – the theme is MAKE SAFETY SEEN #INWED23.
It is a critical discussion as, so much as its interesting and exciting to do engineering, which I love obviously, it’s also key that its for the benefit of society. That’s where the whole AI discussion is at the moment and something we possibly should have considered before allowing social media and the world wide web to open us up to the dangers of having access to a wider society with poor control over behaviour.
Whenever people come up with solutions to problems (which is what engineering is at its core), they primarily consider the known issues, consideration of the impact on the wider society is often an unknown of unknowns, which can be forgotten – or obviously unknown. We don’t know how rogue players will interpret access to new inventions for nefarious use, but we are aware that they do. Cyber, such as access to things such as banking online all make us vulnerable and the affects it has on us is shockingly hurting us far more than was anticipated when the companies offering us the solutions started out on their journeys. Safety solutions which have not considered the wider implications have even bigger potential issues.
We think that the theme this year is possibly more critical than ever – from Autonmous vehicles to AI to social media to internet banking, it all has the ability to affect our lives in a positive and negative manner, so it may be worth signing up to some events.
Just as an extra piece of interest it may be worth checking out Nancy Leveson from MIT who I rate highly – and consider the causal effects of key failures based on the simpler issues such as poor requirements, poor processes and implementation of them as many safety failures can be avoided.
Obviously there are other safety considerations such as safety in the workplace and the behviour and cultural issues within organisations that are unsafe to mental health and wellbeing, but the key point is that anything we do should be beneficial to society.
We’ll leave you to look at all the events but the Key groups to check out are:
