Beyond Algorithms: Engineering Judgment in the Age of AI

When Justin “Gus” Hurwitz walks into a classroom, he’s not there to teach rules. He’s there to teach engineers to see the fracture points between technical judgment, legal obligation, and moral responsibility.

In his Technology, Ethics & the Legal Landscape course, offered within Penn Engineering’s MSE-AI and MCIT programs, a conversation that begins with a question about self-driving cars turns into a debate about the value of human life. Should a company disable a feature if it might cause harm, even if that harm is statistically rare? How do you weigh what’s reasonable against what’s right? Whatever it does, how will the company explain its decision to a judge, a regulator, or an angry member of Congress?

For Gus, those moments of discomfort are the point. His course is less about compliance and more about judgment – training engineers to stop, think, and recognize that every design decision has human consequences. “Engineering is never just technical,” he tells his students. “It’s about the systems we build, and the society we build around them.”

This class captures the “AI + X” philosophy that defines a Penn Engineering Master’s degree: artificial-intelligence engineers must understand not just algorithms, but accountability.

The Teaching Construct: Engineering Judgment in Real Time

Gus’s classroom runs like a design lab for decision-making. He drops students into messy, real-world scenarios – the Ford Pinto recall, Tesla’s $243 million verdict, the “Fight Club” cost-benefit scene – and forces them to test every assumption they have about risk, innovation, and responsibility.

He starts with cases that feel “obviously right.” Within minutes, students realize that every choice shifts harm from one group to another, or from safety to affordability, or from law to market. “Every choice has trade-offs,” he explains. “No matter what set of choices you make, they’re the wrong ones for someone.”

As Gus emphasizes to his students, “The key is recognizing these trade-offs so that you can explain why you made the choices that you did.” His goal: to cultivate engineering judgment – the ability to see that every line of code embeds various social choices in technical ones.

Read More at Penn Engineering Online