Ethics in Engineering Education

Abstract

Although ethics was introduced into the engineering curricula in the 1970s for the first time, it is not yet a standard and integral part of engineering education. As a research discipline, engineering ethics education appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s.Ethics was introduced to biomedical engineering curricula at the Czech Technical University in Prague already in the 1990s and since then it became an integral part of biomedical engineering study programs. However, until now we do not find ethics, for example, in electrical engineering or information technology study programs. Currently, ethics is intensively discussed in relation to artificial intelligence, robotics, and human-machine interaction.Artificial intelligence and robotics are not purely theoretical research areas anymore. They already entered our daily life. The development of autonomous vehicles opened many questions that were previously touched only on a high theoretical level. Nowadays, artificial intelligence and robotics constitute frequently independent study programs and it is highly desirable to introduce the ethical and social issues directly into the curricula. We are well aware of the fact that the curricula have a limited number of courses, should be studied in a limited time and it is impossible to think that students become experts in all studied fields. The conclusion we agreed on is that ethics should become integrated into engineering courses that illustrate the necessity of ethical aspects in real-life applications and examples of practical solutions.In the paper, we present a brief description of our approach to the integration of ethical questions in specific courses in biomedical engineering and biomedical informatics study programs.

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