Episode 7 (2022) Ola Michalec - Engineer-as-a-service. What is the future of engineering professionals in the digital world?

We have the pleasure to chat with Ola Michalec, a Senior Research
Associate at University of Bristol. Don't miss on our discussion
with Ola in 2020.

For decades, nuclear plants, power stations, or wastewater
facilities were safe from the hype of digital innovations. These
industries have traditionally been operated by industrial control
systems fairly simple computers using binary logics to enable the
movement and sensing of engineering machinery. Such technologies
were disconnected from the internet and operated on-site by
manual workers. With the advent of the Fourth Industrial
Revolution (Schilin, 2020) engineering processes are about to
gain sophisticated computing capabilities, from remote control
enabled by the cloud or predictive maintenance thanks to ML
algorithms. Moreover, industry experts (Cisco, 2018) have already
announced that modern computing is blending with legacy
engineering technologies. But who is doing the blending and
revolutionising? Drawing from the approaches in STS and
Computer-Supported-Cooperative Work (Slayton and Clark-Ginsberg,
2018; Jenkins et al., 2020), our research looks at the
collaborative practices between engineers and software workers
(Michalec et al., 2020; Michalec et al, 2021). Based on the case
study of the implementation of cyber security regulations in
critical infrastructures, we investigate how practitioners
navigate tensions between the priorities of modern computing
(security, connectivity, innovations, interoperability) and
traditional engineering (safety, reliability, availability).
Ultimately, we argue that digital innovations entering the world
of critical infrastructures will reconfigure the responsibilities
and training needs for engineers to come. This, in turn, creates
novel ethical and political considerations for the profession,
which should inform the future STS research agenda.


This episode is a live recording from Hacking Everything. The
Cultures and Politics of Hackers and Software Workers panel
organized at the European Association for the study of Science
and Technology (EASST) 2022 conference in Madrid on
2022-07-07. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace
Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who
also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz
University of Technology for funding.