how it might be applied, and the broader consequences of our design and implementation choices.
The Jesuits and the Daily Examen
While this critical reflection is of the utmost importance, identifying the ways that modern tech is wrapped up in perpetuating or innovating systems of marginalization can be overwhelming. Given the complexity and global nature of modern socio-technical systems, it can be difficult to know where to start. Luckily, as technologists, complex systems are our wheelhouse.
If we are capable of designing planes that fly, operating rovers on Mars, and developing generative artificial intelligence (AI) models with billions of parameters, perhaps we are also capable of thinking critically about the impact of our work. In tech, many professional engineers like myself think of ourselves as problem solvers. If we hope to be ethical designers, we must apply these same problem-solving skills to thorny, professional moral issues.
In order to tackle complex technical problems, engineers break them into smaller, more manageable pieces. Individual engineers work on these smaller-scoped challenges and coordinate to bring individual components together to make the entire system work together. We can take a similar approach in reflecting on the impact of our work
The Jesuits, a religious order within the Catholic tradition, offer a wealth of resources and practices that both those within and outside of the order leverage for individual and communal discernment—thoughtfully and intentionally reflecting on decisions, including moral or vocational choices9. One such practice, called the daily examen, invites practitioners to mentally review and evaluate the decisions they make each day10.
Practitioners begin by expressing gratitude for the gifts they have in their lives. They then move on to reviewing their actions from the day and the emotions that different moments evoke in them. Next, they focus on one or a few moments and how their actions either did or did not align with their values. Finally, they shift their focus towards the next day, contemplating how they can act more fully in line with their values.
The examen can be practiced anywhere at any time. It is a flexible practice that leaves space for practitioners to spend as much or little time reflecting on their day as they would like. The shift in focus towards the practitioner’s agency enables them to focus on concrete ways to make small changes to live their values more fully. On the one hand, this focus enables a person to avoid the potential paralysis that can emerge from the sheer complexity inherent in making sweeping changes. On the other, it can help a person to recognize their own potential to make impactful changes and to avoid becoming disillusioned and fatalistic about the possibility of change.
What changes might be possible if modern engineers and technologists adopted a practice like the examen? Drawing on three key themes touched on throughout the FASPE experience—abstraction, accountability, and collective power—I suggest an adaptation of the Jesuit daily examen called the “Tech Examen” that can be practiced by designers and technologists in their professional lives. In the following sections, I dive more deeply into each theme and how it relates to the FASPE trip. I also propose questions corresponding to each category. At the end of this reflection, these questions are synthesized into the "Tech Examen," and I provide an overview of how to engage with this practice.
Dry Bones in Auschwitz
Near the end of the FASPE trip, when we visited the grounds of Auschwitz, I was reminded of the story of the dry bones in Ezekiel 37, which is also cited in an inscription at the entrance to the Yad Vashem memorial. In the story, the prophet Ezekiel is dropped into a valley of dry bones, a metaphor for the house of Israel, which was in exile in Babylon at the time. God then asks Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones to bring them back to life. God, working through Ezekiel’s prophecy, reinvigorates the bones with the breath of life, a symbol of the promise of restoration. At the beginning of this story, God asks Ezekiel: “Mortal, can these bones live?”
While I was standing in Auschwitz, the buildings, the prison cells, the barbed wire, the crematoria, and all their wretched history seemed to cry out and ask just that. I wondered, can modern marginalized and oppressed bones around the globe live? Perhaps the first part of bringing dry bones back to life is taking a step back to reflect and “think what we are doing”11.
Rethinking Abstraction: Rehumanizing Tech
Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live.
Ezekiel 37:5-6
The first theme that emerged from the FASPE site visits and discussions was abstraction. During the Holocaust, the Nazis reduced Jews, Romani people, the unhoused, gay men, individuals with disabilities, and those labeled as criminals to a set of caricatured features, making it easier for the people of Germany to dehumanize these groups. Instead of seeing a Jewish neighbor as a doctor, father, community member, or friend, many came to view them with suspicion. While some of these caricatures were informally promulgated in common conversation among German people or by the Third Reich’s propaganda machine, others were formally systematized through German institutions like census-tracking technologies, medical forms, and ordinances such as the Nuremberg laws12.
One striking example of this process involved the Brandenburg Euthanasia Center, which we visited as a group during our trip. Brandenburg was one of the earliest trial gassing locations, opened as part of Aktion T4 in 193913.
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8 Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu.
9 Office of Ignatian Spirituality. Ignatian Discernment.
10 Office of Ignatian Spirituality. The Examen.