A Macro Ethic For Engineering

William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), called for a macroethic for engineering at the 2000 NAE Annual Meeting citing the impossibility of predicting the behavior of complex systems and the dangers that we bring on ourselves by continuing to unconsciously engineer the biosphere. As human engineered systems and their impacts on earth systems have grown larger and as knowledge has grown from research in complex systems and general systems theory, it has become clear that non-linearity, discontinuous behavior, and uncertainty are the rule rather than the exception in all complex systems including earth systems. The trunk of the tree of knowledge must now be ethics, especially when designing systems that interact with natural systems. In engineering, this fundamental conceptual change can be represented as a macro-ethic.