I'm lucky my younger self had strong anti military instincts and a penchant for the outdoors, which steered me into agricultural engineering. It still takes some effort to maneuver into something actually useful, as a ton of people just end up helping silicon valley types try to "disrupt" farming. but after going back to grad school, I'm on my way to working in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in ag

Being an engineer under socialism would be a dream come true for me because I would know for sure that my work would directly go into helping others.

I feel like community makerspaces are a practical application of this. Obviously, it's not actual socialism, but it's essentially a community library for tools and engineering knowledge. I'd love to be involved with something like that myself, but it would take a bit of money to get it started. Even better would be a network of community workshops that share designs, best practices, lesson plans, etc.

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My dad is a mechanical engineer doing something with nuclear waste idk (we actually have one of the highest engineers per capita here) and the engineers here definitely don't act bougie. There are definitely jobs in engineering that aren't part of the military industrial complex they just aren't as promoted

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Thanks for the reading material - I appreciate anything that helps me structure my thoughts on ethical science, and the letter was a great first impression.

Funny you mention pentesting - our students had to learn what they needed for that on their own for a while, because the telecoms lecturer we had at the time refused to teach network security out of fear that students would become 1337 HAX0Rs.

This is something I've had to think about, because I love teaching control theory (and now that I've made a semester of videos for online teaching, I fully intend to do so on YouTube for free). Feedback control is essential for any system that must self-regulate, so in a world where nobody knows anything about it, you don't have guided missiles, but you also don't have insulin pumps, efficient power generation or electric vehicles. Knowledge isn't inherently good or evil, and denying somebody knowledge that they would use to benefit humanity is also effectively doing harm. (Hence why I feel so strongly about getting our course material out from behind the paywall.)

The society that the students are going out into is a big factor: if I was American, I'd perhaps feel differently about teaching in this field because the majority of graduates do get sucked up by the military industrial complex. Here in South Africa, we only have one significant weapons company, but we do have a shitload of heavy industry and infrastructure projects that uplift communities, and require engineers of all shapes and sizes. (Pity that weapons company is one of the few places that gives really good bursaries... It's worth acknowledging that poor students have far less freedom to weigh up the ethics of who they work for.)

I believe you also have a part to play as a teacher in shaping who your students become: the first thing that planted the seed of anticapitalism in my teenage brain was listening to our crew-cut disciplinarian biology teacher choking up telling us about abalone poaching, and the sick culture of greed and corruption that's destroying the natural world. So, in the introductory lecture, when I tell students about the applications of control theory, I make damn sure they know they are directly contributing to evil if they go in that direction. I also openly refuse to give anybody a reference for a job in that industry. The other academics I work with who have similar specialities feel the same way I do, so hopefully, together, we might have some influence.