Fall 2020

NSPE Today
Policy Guide Focuses on PE’s Role in Emerging Tech

A new NSPE policy guide has added the professional engineer’s voice to the growing conversation around the safe development and deployment of emerging technologies such as advanced automation and artificial intelligence.

The guide’s safety recommendations begin with the premise that the public’s interests are best served when licensed professional engineers oversee the design, development, and/or deployment of emerging technologies. NSPE’s Emerging Technologies Task Force crafted the recommendations as a starting point for adopting standards that protect public safety and to provide guidelines to measure the safety readiness of technologies before they are deployed. The guide is intended for public policy decisionmakers, regulators, manufacturers, and others.

The guide covers six interconnected areas, requiring collective adoption and implementation: ethics, risk assessment, standards, transparency, accountability, and third-party verification.

NSPE strongly encourages the adoption of these recommendations and is available as a resource for information and drafting of regulations.