Daniel Hastings on Justice

Thank you Bethan. I got my PhD in plasma physics, so my research was initially on the fusion energy research as a scientist doing fusion energy work. Then over time I transitioned to using the discipline of plasma physics to actually take a look at the effect of space plasmas upon how you think about designing satellites and systems in space. So I transitioned from doing pure science in a sense to doing engineering. So my career has evolved as my interests have changed. That's one of the things you can do as a professor; if your interests change, you just shift.

Well, the way we conventionally define what scientists do is that scientists discover what is in nature. And as a Christian, I would say scientists discover how God has structured and created nature, whereas engineers actually create things. They build things which obviously are humanly created and therefore have never existed before, right? So scientists discover; engineers create and build, obviously using the discipline of science in order to do that. The laws of science particularly and mathematics particularly is what's really very useful, both can honor God because the discovery of what God has done in the world is great, but also creating things for the betterment of mankind is also a great thing to do, I think it is very honoring to God.

Well, first of all, let me point out that certainly since engineering is about creating systems of systems, products for the betterment of mankind, the actual utility of what you create very much gets to some of the issues of justice. Do you create things which are useful by many or only by a few? And who do they benefit? Those questions actually do arise when you look at the applications of engineering. But my own journey, as you said, when I was doing applied physics, I was very aware the fact that some of the applications, what I was doing could eventually lead to working on nuclear weapons. And at that time, I actually did know people who graduated from MIT and went to work on designing nuclear weapons. And so I thought a lot about that. Was that something that as a Christian, I could and should do?

06:21So to be clear, the question in my mind, it was not whether or not working on weapons per se was a good or bad thing. Because in both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, you see examples of people who were soldiers and Jesus Christ interacted with people who were soldiers, and there was never a sense that he thought that what they were doing was in some sense bad. But the question with nuclear weapons particularly was as I read about the principles of just war. Nuclear weapons at that time, this was of course in the seventies, early eighties, the only purpose I could see about the weapons that existed at that time was for destruction of cities. And that in just war understanding is so disproportionate to what you're going to do, which is what the principles of just war actually called for, that it seemed to me that that was just the wrong thing to do. So I determined that I would not work on those. Okay, so of course subsequently what happened was that the technology of precision strike advanced to the point where it became possible to design small enough nuclear weapons that you could very precisely hit not a city but an actual silo. And so then it raised the question, well, was I against working on all nuclear weapons or just city killing nuclear weapons? So that caused a lot of thought, what the right thing to do was.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So let me start with the story of GPS, because I'm quite familiar with it. I know and knew personally some of the original architects of GPS. It wasn't conceived of initially as an entirely military system to provide precise navigation and timing for military forces to do whatever it is they were going to do, and with a small civilian adjunct. And it's very clear from both the original people who designed it and the original documents that nobody realized that the small civilian adjunct would become so large. But what happened was, of course, after the US decided to make it very public after the KAL 007 shootdown, and over time, more and more people came to realize the utility of GPS. People realized how much value you could get from knowing your position and time very precisely on the surface of the earth. Thus it became essentially a utility available to everybody, to the point where by 1997, the US declared that it would make GPS freely available to the world in perpetuity. And that utility has provided enormous economic benefits to the world. Alright, now the way I told the story, of course it was entirely accidental where they ended up, it was not at all planned on the part of the US.

10:45So my thinking in thinking about the development of global internet access, which is occurring right now as various companies are launching satellites to provide internet access to the world. These companies, of course are private companies, SpaceX and actually Amazon Kuiper. Amazon has started to build their satellites and they're about to start launching any day now. Their satellites and what they all provide is internet access, at fairly high speeds anywhere in the world. Okay. So the question in my mind as I thought about that is, should that go the same way as GPS did? Now, the story of GPS of course, as I said, was accidental, but now we can actually think about it ahead of time. Now, I do understand that these companies have to make a profit. So the GPS is run by the US Air Force. It doesn't have to make a profit, but the companies, SpaceX, Amazon, the other people who are putting up OneWeb do have to make a profit.

12:00I do understand that. So my own thinking is that the best thing for those companies to do is to offer a free service at some level and we can debate what the level should be and then offer paid additions to the service because the access to the internet is of such value in terms of the utility of the information that everybody, the poor and the rich, should all have access to it anywhere in the world. So it seems to me that is the fair and the just thing to do. And what's interesting, of course, if you look at the things that came after GPS, which is the European Galileo System, that's exactly what they tried to do. Galileo is the European analogue to GPS. It has a free service and then it has a number of value-added paid services so that in this case, the European Union can actually make some money off of it. So that's, in my thinking, is when you think about justice applied against these utilities, which provide value to everybody, you should make it such that everybody can access them. But I understand you also have to make money. So the two things can be held in tension, as the theologians say, in tension and still be viable, it seems to me.

Well, it's access to information. Basically, the internet gives you access to the information of the world. It allows a poor farmer in some country to understand that the best way to put down the fertilizer or when to water; it gives us access to libraries etc. etc. In the old days, the old days is before 1992, believe it or not, you actually had to go to a library to find out all this information, and now you can just see it. Now, of course, there is another issue that immediately arises, which is how do you know that the information you get is trustworthy? Which is a huge problem on the internet. How do you tell the veracity or validity of the information? And so what you do have to do is educate people on how to think critically about the stuff that they actually see and look at multiple sources of information to try to understand what really is the truth there. But the value that brings to everybody having access to the information of the world is just immense. It allows you to do things that, to have access to knowledge, that you wouldn't even have thought about actually before. Right now, it allows people who have illnesses to be able to get some sense of how you treat those illnesses. I mean, it's a whole range of different things which are just enabled by this broad access to the internet, right?

It allows people to actually coordinate their actions, not just locally, which is what you had to do before, but actually on a worldwide basis. And so in that sense, by seeing justice and injustice, their coordinated actions can have some effect. Now, of course, there's a dark side to this too, as we come to realize. I mean, people can coordinate their actions for justice, but people who are into terrorism can also coordinate their actions. That's the dark side. We know that now, right? So I'm not saying I believe the internet is a uniform good. I do not believe that, but there are many good things about it. As long as you put various guard rails in place, I think it makes sense, right?

Yes.

Well realize that that's what happened. As a matter of fact, there'll be many scholars who've debated fundamentally, is technology good or bad? Is the development of technology good or bad? And if you read a lot of that literature, at least my conclusion I come to is that fundamentally it's neutral and it's human beings who use it for evil or for good. And in the sense that justice can come out of human beings using the development of technology for a good end, then that's a good thing. And scholars should recognize it. And I would say in the development of technology, I do think any Christian scholars should actually think about what are the potential implications of this technology? But with a very large dose of humility, because the history of technological development is replete with emergent things happening. That is, at the time people thought it was going to be A, and what actually happened was B, or they thought it was going to be A and A did happen, but A had some consequence that they didn't actually recognize, and over the long run, something else happened. So we're not very good at foreseeing the implications of technology. Actually, a wonderful example is to look at the internal combustion engine, which was developed of course in the late 1880s, 1890s in Germany. And there was a prediction that was done in the early 1900s, about 1900s, about New York City that by 1925, the horse manure in New York City in the streets would be up to people's knees. Every street would be covered by horse manure because there were so many horses. And then there's a picture of New York City, 1925, and there's not a horse to be seen. And what you see is cars, what we'd now call cars, although they were Model T kind of stuff. That's what you see, because the technology, the internal combustion engine, plus of course, the development of mass manufacturing led to the automobile, and they completely supplanted horses. So what it shows is a prediction about horses was wrong. Now what did the automobile lead to? It led to, of course, a lot of things that people did not appreciate at the time. It led to the sprawl we see because you could travel now much further, much more quickly. So it led to suburban sprawl.

20:14It led of course to probably, certainly in America, the families moving further away from each other. But we now understand that the internal combustion engine also led to something else, which is a significant contribution to global climate change. In the United States 40% of the effect of carbon emissions come from automobiles and trucks, 40%. And we know this literally has global consequences. I can assure you there was no prediction of that, not when the internal combustion engine was created, and now we have to do things to mitigate that. So you say one thing and something else happens, is having an automobile more just for the society, for people than having a horse? I think probably yes. I mean, we can deal with mitigating with the effects of sprawl. So I think so. But we have to account for the fact that it has all these other effects that we now have to deal with. So in that sense, it's just neutral. You just have to acknowledge the fact you don't know what's going to happen in the future.

Constantly, humility. Right.

Well, so I served on a number of advisory committees to the government. So I served in the government as Chief Scientist of the Air Force, and I concluded after that I was better at serving in an advisory role, by the way. But these committees, like the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, the NASA Advisory Council, the Defense Science Board, I mean, I've served on all of these. And so basically what I try to do is, and what they're looking to me to do is with integrity, say what makes sense from a science and technological point of view.

22:43We kind of get asked questions on those boards that are at the interface of technology, policy, and economics. Now, they have other people who help them with economics, but you do have to care about how much these systems actually cost. So as a Christian, the first thing is important is to speak with integrity. If something is not true, say it's not true; if something is true to say it's true. And of course, to give the appropriate dose of what uncertainty in these scientific and technological predictions. And also acknowledge when you don't know things. So as an advisor there, my job is to do those things, to give appropriate advice, usually in the context of a committee, and then to call out issues when I think they need to be called out. There's no value in staying silent if you have something to say, but if you have something to say, there's value in speaking with, I said, with integrity, I mean that's what really matters. The people in the positions in government need to be able to hear the truth, whatever the truth is. Now, the committees I serve on, they're primarily asking for truth in the sense of whether the technology works as opposed to moral truth.

24:10But that's what I do. And as a Christian, I think that's important to do, and I see from my point of view as a way of helping to serve the country.

Yeah, so I'm currently the Head of the Aeronautics and Astronautics department. I'm also Associate Dean of Engineering for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. So as the head of the department, I try to be sure that we act proactively to make sure that the excellent students who want to get into the department can actually get in. So in the aerospace field, which is where I am, historically has not been particularly welcoming to women, for example. So we set a goal that we as a leadership department, we're going to show that we can be different and be different. So I emphasize that in our graduate admissions, we only admit people who are excellent, but if we can attract more women to be interested in aerospace, we'll do that.

25:40So we took a hard look at why is it that people, women particularly were not interested in aerospace. And as one of my colleagues said, it's because we had the image, the top gun image, fast fighter aircraft image. And so, alright, the aerospace does do fast fighter aircraft, but we also do a bunch of other things. We do a lot of things about environmental sustainability. So we now emphasize more of that stuff as well to try to attract people in. And as Associate Dean for DEI, one of the things I've been doing is, we've been creating a set of programs throughout the school of engineering to attract students at every level. So we already had programs to attract students who were undergraduates into engineering and then graduate students. So we didn't have a postdoc programs. So I created a postdoc program that tries to attract a diverse group of people to be in engineering. So we raise the money, we bring people, and then we make them available to be for all kinds of jobs, including jobs at MIT, because that's the right thing to do. This is how we'll help change the face of engineering.

That's what I see, that as an issue of equity and justice. I mean, my goal is to remove the barriers that exist and then that people should have the free ability to choose consistent with the abilities that they have.

Well, first of all, whatever you do, do it with excellence. Secondly, do think hard about the implications of your scholarship. Now, as I said, for people who are technologists, a lot of technology is neutral, but the applications are not neutral. So really think hard about that and then think about what are the things you actually want to be involved with. And then the third thing I would say is as scholars, we write papers and write books and that's good. That's good. Alright. I'm not saying it's not good. I do believe it's good, but the reality is, as much of our impact, maybe even more of our impact is on the people we end up mentoring. So I would say as a Christian scholar, make sure you mentor your students well; mentor them well, and show a witness in terms of how you mentor them. And that in the long run, I'm not saying true for everybody, for many people will have more impact than the papers and the books that you write.