Ethics

“Ask your doctor if it’s right for you.” Anyone who has watched American television knows the sentence by heart. It sounds like caution, but read it slowly and it’s a script: here is a feeling you may not have noticed, here is a product that addresses it, and here is a professional whose role in the transaction is to ratify or veto a decision you have already half-made. The ad doesn’t sell a drug. It sells a diagnosis and rents a doctor’s authority to close the deal. …

In traditional engineering—civil, mechanical, structural—a “Senior Engineer” is someone the insurance company will let sign off on blueprints. If those blueprints fail and a bridge collapses, there is liability. There are lawsuits. There are corpses. The title is not social; it is a legal and physical fact. It is directly tied to how much you can be trusted, which directly tied to what you can earn. A Senior Engineer can be trusted because the product is permanent and failure is irreversible. …

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude offers a vivid moment when José Arcadio Buendía dismisses a fantastical flying carpet, claiming he could achieve superior results with science: “Una tarde se entusiasmaron los muchachos con la estera voladora que pasó veloz al nivel de la ventana del laboratorio llevando al gitano conductor y a varios niños de la aldea que hacían alegres saludos con la mano, y José Arcadio Buendía ni siquiera la miró. «Déjenlos que sueñen», dijo. «Nosotros volaremos mejor que ellos con recursos más científicos que ese miserable sobrecamas.»” …