[MUSIC] [APPLAUSE] >> Hello, my name is Micaela dos Ramos. I'm the chief executive officer of KIVI, the Royal Netherlands Society of Engineers and today, I want to talk about would and should. My first question, what would you do if you were an engineer at Volkswagen working on diesel engines, and you were asked to develop software that cheats the permissions tests on the diesel engines? And you did inform your superiors about the effect and the fraud perpetrated, but the work is going on as started. What would you do? Would you keep objecting? Would you stop cooperating? Would you satisfy yourself with the knowledge that you have informed the right people or do you just go on with your work and to let the engine run smartly within the set requirements and make the motor management system recognize that the car is being tested? These are all valid answers and options that an engineer can choose, and many more I think. But if you would just change the question in what would I do to what should I do, would the answers to those questions, would they change? They probably would. In all times there was and will be a difference between would and should, or should, and everybody should ask oneselves that last question more often, what should I do? What is the best way to handle the situation, and what does society expect of me? Technology is just what we work with. It has its impacts on people, society and the environment. And therefore, engineers carry a responsibility to take care of these for the health and safety of people, society, and the environment. As engineers, we do not only study the world, but we change it, with the intention, of course, to improve it. And this is not an easy task because this work always has to be done within times of money and it is a very responsible one and requires not only engineering knowledge but also among others, ethical reflection and insight. And society asks for technological solutions, but initially, only engineers understand the impact and the risks of the presented solution. Engineers have to take their responsibility to create safe, sound solutions, but not only to warn society for the risk, but also for the dangers that could even occur. We have a responsibility. At Volkswagen, engineers have used their ingenuity to let the company get away with lies about their product, and these lies had an impact on the environment. Maybe not an awful lot, but the emission was higher than allowed. And much greater was even the impact on the company, Volkswagen, the trust of the customers and the trust of society, that was greatly hampered. KIVI has formulated a code of ethics for engineers. And the first line says, when we make technical decisions, we take the safety and health of people and the environment into account. And furthermore, we report the factors that affect the safety of society and the environment. And of course, I don't expect engineers at Volkswagen to know the KIVI Code of Conduct, but these codes are more or less the same around the world. And so this line should be common ground for engineers all over the world. The discussion about ethical behavior of engineers is as old as engineering itself. Society should be confident that engineers create things to improve the world in a competent and safe and sustainable way. They should be able to depend on us for that. And that is why KIVI has written this code of conduct for engineers. And the text is not just formulated by us as an institution, but is collected from engineers in the field, and is reviewed by a broad sounding group and also updated every few years to see if it's still accurate and if we still feel the same way about it. It is and should be a continuous topic of discussion. The Volkswagen scandal is one of the biggest, at least, definitely of late, around engineers these days. But a lot of ethical questions pop up whenever we are engaged in developing robots, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, the Internet of things. Every engineer encounters ethical questions in their work, bigger or smaller, and we need to help all engineers to ask critical questions on the right moment. And to wonder whether the chosen route is the best in all perspectives and to foresee the possible consequences of their decisions. And KIVI wants to encourage all engineers to internalize this professional attitude and wants to introduce engineering students with the moral obligation of their future profession. We keep the discussion going and hope to achieve that engineers act according to it in their daily work. We believe that an engineer should do this routinely, and therefore ethical behavior is also included in the competencies that engineers need to become a Chartered Engineer or an Incorporated Engineer. And this is an internationally recognized professional standard. And it's an extra motivation for engineers to keep up to date in their professional field and in their work and their competencies as an engineer. But the code is not only a guide for the engineers themselves. Also, the organizations where engineers work should take notice of it. There should be environments within your workplace where critical questions are welcomed and discussion is possible, both within the organization and outside if relevant. The goal of ethical codes is not to strictly follow the phrases but to ask questions to yourself and to others. Technology is developing rapidly and we need to be thinking about the impact of implementation. We see that ethics and safety sometimes follow in a lower pace. The ethical code helps engineers to take a moment to think and talk about the effect of their actions. Ethical codes are, however, a starting point. The questions we talk about here are sometimes not easy to answer. Situations we meet are not always straightforward. And that is why we need to be talking to each other to find a deeper understanding and to find our own convictions to help guide us and sharpen our minds on how to continue to exercise our profession in an ethical way, according to such a code, and that is what this MOOC is all about. If every engineer takes these little moments of reflection and twists the question from what would I do, to what should I do, then I think we are a step closer to what all of us motivated to be an engineer in the first place, and that is to make this world a better place. Thank you very much. >> [APPLAUSE]
