Respect

One of the things that annoys me most is when people with a “liberal arts background”, that is, who never studied anything related to hard sciences, math or engineering, treat us engineers, computer people or scientists as if we were robots, or flat-out “inhuman”.

The biggest insult is that false split between “sciences” and “humanities”. We the little nerds, the more introverted ones, the ones fascinated by science and rationality, are regarded as autistic robots who spend all day thinking about code, or mathematical equations, algorithms or heuristics, detached from humanity, incapable of feeling or empathizing with “the sorrows, joys or fears of the people”.

Even those who present themselves as more “open”, in the middle of a debate, when they are confronted, when their contradictions and ignorance are pointed out, will play the card of treating you as an automaton, incapable of feelings, and will make sure to insult you by insinuating that you know nothing about people’s feelings, or the people’s, if the topic is politics.

They feel entitled to call you inhuman or insensitive just because you work with algorithms or formulas. To them you are in the wrong, because supposedly you see the world in a very simplified way, and therefore you have no right to an opinion on matters of society, or of humanity.

And you know what? That is pure bullshit!

I’m fortunate to work on what I like, which is technology, but luckier still because with my current job I help almost every Chilean, if not all of them. I work on the border between the private and public worlds. My team builds systems that help calculate social benefits, or safeguard information that benefits the most vulnerable people in our country. Among many other things.

Over my career I have written code that supports systems that let airplanes land safely at our main airport.

Your house or office was probably built with cement produced by automated machinery controlled by a few lines of code I wrote.

Maybe you were once given, or denied, a loan because someone queried a service I helped redesign, which let that bank, or store, know about your level of debt. It’s not the most pleasant job I’ve had, but the point is that this system affected and still affects the lives of many people who want to borrow money, or buy something.

When I saw former president Ricardo Lagos on television bathing in the decontaminated waters of Chañaral I smiled, because code of mine was running in the water treatment plant up there at the El Salvador mine. Code in C that helped decontaminate the water, and made it possible to recycle it.

If there was ever an alert in your town because pollution levels from the smelter near your house were over the limit, it was because the radio stations and the authorities got an alert by fax from a sensor system I programmed with my colleagues.

Maybe you are one of those sailors in the fjords of southern Chile who was able to send messages using the Inmarsat GPS on top of the cabin, in an area no radio signal reaches, but you were able to communicate thanks to the program I wrote, and I’m glad you were.

Perhaps you are that couple who won an apartment on television by sending an SMS to a morning show contest. I’m happy for you too, and it pleases me that you used the interactive mobile games platform I wrote several years ago.

I could go on, because as a “good autistic robot” I have written a lot of code that has affected, in many ways, most of the time positively, many people in this country.

So I feel proud, because I have concrete things to say, to show, that affect or affected the people, the ones politicians and “liberal arts folks” love to go on about.

If I do my job badly I can harm a lot of people, a lot of families. I have a great responsibility and I pass it on to my team and colleagues, because we handle sensitive information, and we jealously guard its integrity and try to keep malicious people from getting access to it.

Why do I care? Because I have ethics, because I am aware of my society, because I am human, Chilean, a father and a husband, and I know what it is to be screwed by a computer error, or by a database that refuses to forget or forgive your mistakes. Because I am not a robot.

So, “liberal arts friends”, don’t you think that I deserve, that we engineers deserve, a minimum of respect?

We are human, maybe more human, but I don’t want to commit your sin of arrogance, so at least treat us with respect, and stop calling us “Nerd”, “Robot” or “Mr. Spock”. It isn’t funny.