Beyond algorithms: Engineering judgment in the age of AI
Penn professor Justin ‘Gus’ Hurwitz helps students build “engineering judgment” to better inform AI innovation. This skill involves thoughtfully balancing the trade-offs between technical choices, legal obligation, and moral responsibility.
2 min. read
In his Technology, Ethics, & the Legal Landscape course, Justin “Gus” Hurwitz turns 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 Hurwitz, senior fellow and academic director of the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition at Penn Carey Law, 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: AI engineers must understand not just algorithms, but accountability. “Engineering isn’t just about building technology—it’s about understanding how that technology impacts society,” says Boon Thau Loo, senior associate dean for Education and Global Initiatives. “Gus’s course brings that to life. It’s the first collaboration between our law and engineering schools in the online space, and it sold out within days. That tells you how deeply students crave this kind of learning.”
Gus helps engineers see law not as a constraint, but as a partner in building a more accountable tech future. For MSE-AI and MCIT students, it’s proof that responsible AI isn’t just an elective topic—it’s the new professional baseline. What Gus is building isn’t just a course—it’s a new kind of literacy. When students practice trade-offs before they’re executives, when they learn how negligence and design failure rhyme, when they recognize law as a form of collective memory, they stop treating ethics as an afterthought.
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