Writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2011, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously proclaimed, “Software is eating the world.” In 2019 it’s difficult to imagine anyone arguing otherwise. At the moment, artificial intelligence is inviting the most thrilling hype and the most eloquent alarm, but such compelling press obscures our much more pedestrian reality: software is made by people, millions and millions of us. Together we are inventing the future, and if the daily scandals are any indication, we may not be doing a very good job of it.

This is certainly not a new observation, but it’s worth repeating for two reasons. The first reason is that — apparently, shockingly, and despite setbacks — self-driving cars will be here long before we’re ready for them (while Palantir, astonishingly, is already here). And the second reason is that, after an unruly couple of decades, software development is beginning to standardize — with many of the predictable results that this implies: products that mirror other products, data breaches that mirror other data breaches, privacy incidents that mirror other privacy incidents, etc.

When developing a new software product, large corporations now follow a nearly identical process: product managers define the requirements, designers like me design the product, and engineers build it. (True, software engineers still invent the wildest and most world-changing things, usually without a designer or product manager in sight, but this type of revolutionary work typically happens at early-stage startups — far less so at Fortune 500 companies.)

As this process solidifies across the corporate landscape, the logical points of entry are also becoming more rigid: would-be engineers go into computer science programs, would-be product managers go into business programs, and would-be designers (depending on their interests) go into computer science, cognitive science, or graphic design programs. This pattern is reasonable enough; if there’s a specific skill you want to learn, it makes sense to go to the place where it’s taught most directly.

And yet, these mounting scandals are starting to prompt some uncomfortable questions: Is this educational model producing a strong army with a weak moral compass? Are we — through some combination of indifference, ignorance, and greed — creating unethical products? If the scandals keep happening, can it be accidental?

To give just one example, a “customer-obsessed” company I worked at had an odd policy: when a customer cancelled their subscription, the company confiscated any unused credits that remained in the account. I noticed this soon after starting the job and mentioned to several people that it seemed like a class-action suit waiting to happen. They shrugged, and as it turned out I was wrong anyhow — the policy became the subject of not one, but two class-action suits.

Even in the best of circumstances, though, corporations are not the first place most people look to for ethical guidance. The global economy has never rewarded prudence and it only very rarely punishes recklessness. As a result, the average company has no incentive to slow down or reflect, and it is naive to expect that they might suddenly decide to do so. Which is to say, corporations are probably not a good place to teach ethics.

Rather, maybe ethics could continue to be taught where it always has been — in schools — but with a renewed enthusiasm for breadth over depth. (And in this way, the subject might be returned to its Platonic roots, as the foundational lesson for any nascent philosopher king.) If ethics can be pulled from its specialized niches and urgently pushed into the academic mainstream, more and more students will have a chance to enter the workforce with a new set of skills, the skills we’ll need to begin crafting more humane products and policies.

Fortunately, this argument is gaining in popularity. Subtopics like business ethics and bioethics have already shown how these concepts can be applied to a variety of disciplines, so new challenges are now suggesting themselves. For example, how should ethics programs be developed for other common disciplines? And how can it be done in such a way that abstract concepts become concrete concerns?

Creativity and specificity will likely be key. As a designer who has spent over a decade working at places like Apple, Amazon, and Caterpillar, I’d expect ethics to be taught to aspiring designers very differently from how it’s taught to aspiring engineers. And by this I mean: I have no idea how ethics should be taught to engineers. I work with amazing engineers every day to build absurdly complex things, but the honest truth is that we speak different languages and communicate via pidgin.

On the other hand, I routinely interview recent grads with an interest in design, and what I increasingly notice is that their resumes and portfolios are spectacular in all the same ways. Which is odd for several reasons. Do they take classes in resume-building now? Is this what they’re being instructed to worry about? Is this how they spend a portion of their four sacred college years? I don’t know, but what I do know is how rarely I see that spark of genuine difference, that glimpse of shining soul.

The first two questions I always want to ask are: Why do you even have a resume? And where did you get a portfolio from? I don’t really care what you’ve done — you’re only 22! — but I do want to know what you think about. I want to know what excites you, what scares you. I want to know what keeps you up at night, what you talk about when drunk at four in the morning. Because that’s the hard part about ethics: you have to think about it constantly if you want to have any hope of getting something right. Simply not thinking about it is usually all it takes to produce unethical results — malice is rarely required.

But how to get to such a thoughtful place, how to guide these students there? That part’s tricky. Regardless of discipline — whether design, engineering, business, or something else — an introduction to the classics could be worthwhile: Aristotle, Confucius, Nietzsche, etc. I realize even this syllabus is contentious, but an understanding of Nietzsche’s “will to power” ought to keep any budding idealist from jumping to too-easy solutions (while simultaneously providing a nuanced psychological explanation for Silicon Valley…Wall Street…Capitalism…and maybe humans in general).

Once the basics are covered, though, I imagine the various ethics programs would quickly diverge. The important thing is that the programs feel relevant and applicable, which is why they might need to be tailored to each discipline; a series of generic courses offered by the philosophy department is unlikely to have as much impact.

To illustrate this, consider the cognitive science and computer science students who are interested in design. Rather than focusing on industrial or graphic design, they are generally drawn to “human-centered design.” And, as employers have noticed, this is a potent combination: these students will understand how the brain works, they will understand how computers work, and they will understand how to design products in light of these two things.

Said another way, they will graduate with a very good sense of what could be done. To balance this, the ethics program will need to explore what should be done — and it will need to do this by emphasizing the messy human aspects, not the science and design aspects (which can be left to the rest of the coursework).

For human-centered design students, field research is an essential part of the curriculum. From Franz Boas and Margaret Mead to Xerox PARC and IDEO, a hundred years of modern anthropology has shown that there’s just no substitute for getting out there and having a look around. Perhaps the ethics program could build on this, pushing students to venture beyond observation and into participation. This type of exercise may not produce scientifically valid data, but maybe that’s not the point. Participation creates a visceral connection, which can be particularly instructive for natural introverts — as so many of us designers are.

Also, maybe these students could read some science fiction? Or, even more unorthodox, maybe some novels? How better, after all, to understand how humans think and feel and fret? Where better to explore another’s fear and joy and love? No other medium offers such intimacy, usually not even people themselves. (Unconvinced? Pick up The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s 800-page magnum bouillabaisse. It covers pretty much everything, in record speed.)

Still, these are just guesses. Until tech ethics programs exist in greater numbers, it’s hard to say what they should entail. Is it enough to require a token class called “The Ethics of Software Development,” or do these concepts need to be woven into the major more seamlessly and fundamentally?

My guess is the latter, but whatever the ultimate shape, there’s no doubt such programs will need to be carefully imagined and then refined through trial and error until they resonate and propagate. Brilliant people are already working on this problem, so now my hope is that they’ll paddle back down their various creeks and find creative ways to merge together in the mainstream. As the current gains speed, I’d love to join in.