three years after the second
collapse, the Prince of Wales
presided over its opening. The
bridge held. Soon, cars and trains
were crossing the same river in
which so many people had died.
For a century, it has stood as the
longest cantilever bridge in the
world. Quebec and Canada have
prospered for it.
More important, the collapses
became an ethical touchstone.
A professor named H.E. T. Haul-
tain decided that he wanted to
commemorate the story, and
he called on the poet and author
Rudyard Kipling, who had pre-
viously written an ode to engi-
neers, for help. Haultain worked
with Kipling and the leaders of
Canada’s main engineering
universities to develop what’s
called “The Ritual of the Call-
ing of an Engineer.” And for
nearly a century, graduates
have gone through a ceremony
in which they recite their obli-
gations to their craft: “I will not
henceforward suffer or pass, or
be privy to the passing of, Bad
Workmanship or Faulty Material
in aught that concerns my works
before mankind as an Engineer,
or in my dealings with my own
Soul before my Maker.”
At the end of the ceremony,
they are given iron rings to wear
as a reminder of these obliga-
tions: Move slow and get things
right. According to myth, the
first of these rings were forged
from pieces of the collapsed
bridge. The rings are worn on
the pinky finger of the dominant
hand, so that they click on the
table when the engineer signs
or stamps a blueprint.
The culture of civil engineers
has always been different from
the culture of software engi-
neers. The former are formally
certified and regulated; the latter can learn
their craft from scratch in their basement.
And there’s good reason for civil engineers
to demand more rigor than their software
engineer brethren. If you make a mistake in
a line of code, you can fix it from your chair.
Repairing a steel beam submerged in an icy
river is a different matter. Software com-
panies grow, too, according to the logic of
network effects and increasing returns to
scale. They have to move fast if they want
to thrive. Such rules and logic rarely, if ever,
apply in the physical world.
So, yes, the cultures have to be different.
And the problems differ too. The bridge col-
lapsed twice because of failure in execution;
Facebook’s problem was more a failure of
imagination and the inability to see how the
platform could be used for harm.
That said, Silicon Valley, and software
engineers everywhere, could still learn
something from the culture that asks its
adherents to wear those iron rings. Tech
companies operate in digital worlds, but
their actions have consequences in the phys-
ical one. And when you build things, you are
responsible to the people who use them. You
have to think through what could go wrong
instead of assuming everything will go right.
You have to build as if you have a ring forged
from a shattered bridge on your pinky.
Sometimes systems crack, and then they
shatter. But sometimes the crack leads to
the remedy. And that’s what we need now:
a coming together of many tribes to fix the
mess we’re in, and to learn from the mis-
takes the industry has made. We need action
from governments, builders, users, people
inside Silicon Valley, and people every-
where else writing code.
The point isn’t to stop progress but to
enable it. Much of the magic in our livescomes from software: the music we hear,
the movies we watch, the stories we tell.
We live longer, eat better, and keep in our
pockets computers more powerful than the
supercomputers that guided the first people
in space. We can record police abuses
with our smartphones and hold power to
account. Gene editing could help us feed
the planet; we may send people to Mars;
technological acumen is redefining global
politics. A thousand inefficient businesses
have been pulled up from the roots, as bet-
ter ideas have sprung from the soil.
And that’s what this issue is about: the
builders who understand the consequences
of their choices. It’s about people who recog-
nize the awesome responsibility of the tech-
nological powers bequeathed to us by our
predecessors. There’s Kate Darling, whose
research is redefining the way we think about
our moral responsibilities to robots. There’s
Patrick Collison, who, along with his brother,
created a company, Stripe, that makes it
vastly easier for people all over the world
to start businesses and process payments
without tearing down the entire financial
system. There’s Laura Boykin, using pocket-
DNA sequencing to save Africa’s cassava
crop. There’s Eva Galperin, protecting her
fellow hackers from stalkerware and author-
itarians. There’s Moriba Jah, working to map
the garbage orbiting our planet.
These are people who build things fast
but who are also fixing things. They’re
using technology to take us to new places.
They’re thinking deeply—but not to the
point of paralysis—about the problems
society faces and the ways that technol-
ogy can help. They’re people who realized
that the bridge they were building may have
collapsed, but rather than abandon it, they
built it anew with forethought. Or, as the
ceremony of the Iron Ring requires one
to pledge, “My Time I will not refuse; my
Thought I will not grudge; my Care I will
not deny towards the honour, use, stabil-
ity and perfection of any works to which I
may be called to set my hand.”NICHOLAS THOMPSON (@nxthompson) is
wired’s editor in chief.