Rockwell (Rocky) Clancy is a Doctor of Philosophy with a rooted passion in applying philosophy to areas of the rest of the world. He first sparked his interest in academia growing up near Chicago which would then evolve into living, working, and studying across Europe and China. Now as a Research Scientist with Virginia Tech Engineering Education, Rocky is researching the impact of education and culture on how people perceive digital ethics. In this interview, he shares his journey from philosophy to advancing ethical conversations in the digital age.
How do you think where you were raised impacted you?
I was born in Evanston and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I was super lucky to have been born in the United States in a middle-upper class educated family growing up in the suburbs of Chicago. For me, there was always the expectation I would go to college and even at a high school level, a lot of my teachers had PhDs in history and subjects that instilled in me the importance in learning in pursuit of academic topics.
Were there traces in your upbringing of what you are doing today?
I think so since I’ve lived in many places. My grandfather came from Hungary to the United States during the ’56 revolution and since my mom’s first language is Hungarian, she wanted to reconnect with her roots. In my early teenage years, we had spent the summer in Budapest and traveled to France, the UK, Italy- all over. That gave me a desire to travel and see new places and meet different people.
Would you say there was one person or event in particular that had a large impact on you?
It was during college that I realized learning is interesting and how what we learn in history and philosophy connects to everything else. I had a cultural anthropology professor who was the first to introduce me to philosophers like Marx when I was 19 and it blew my mind. I was an economics major when I started college and I hated the idea of studying philosophy so I came into class with that mentality. My introduction to philosophy professor ended up being awesome in terms of answering questions and challenging me. Eventually, I decided I didn’t want to do economics anymore. I also realized that all disciplines have come from philosophy, so Marx and Adam Smith weren’t economists because there was no economics at the time- they were philosophers. I think the first appearances of the root of biology came from the writings of Aristotle, so philosophy is about everything and that was instrumental for me.
Can you talk about your career journey?
I studied philosophy in my undergraduate and then I decided I wanted to become a university professor. At the time, I was interested in what’s called continental philosophy, or French and German philosophy, and the place to study that at the time was Catholic University in Belgium. When I was 22 I moved to Belgium to do my master’s degree and I started my PhD there. I ended up getting funding for my PhD from Purdue University to pursue a PhD in philosophy. The last year of my PhD I went to France to improve my French and then finished my dissertation. At that point, I had applied for postdocs in Belgium and the Netherlands and ended up not getting them. I didn’t know what I was going to do because it’s really hard to get academic jobs, especially in philosophy, and even more difficult to get an academic job writing about French political philosophy. My advisor at the time was speaking at a conference in China and he told me to apply to the philosophy department for funding and then come attend this conference. So I went to the conference in China and I was blown away. I’ve never been nor had an interest in China or East Asia, but I was intrigued. I was studying with a lot of Chinese students in my French courses in France and they had told me China was an up and coming place to be so I ended up applying to a job in China for the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University is a good engineering and science school in China and originally, I was teaching writing courses and survey philosophy courses because the idea was to introduce a U.S. style engineering education into China. After a year I turned my dissertation into a book and published other chapters and articles about it. In 2013-14 I teamed up with an interdisciplinary research team at the university, and I worked with them to design studies on engineering ethics across cultures, how to do survey work and how to analyze the results, which has more or less been my trajectory ever since. In 2020 I left China in the middle of the pandemic and then I was in the Netherlands for a year because I got a position there, but we ended up winning a big NSF grant so I went back to the United States, to Colorado, to work on that for a year.
Now I’m a research scientist in engineering education at Virginia Tech. In the future, I am interested in doing what I am doing now, but for government or government-adjacent organizations, to continue using insights and methodologies from the behavioral and social sciences to better understand the impact of education and culture on how people think about issues surrounding right and wrong with regard to technology. For example, whether people think it’s okay to use AI in healthcare. This is what I’ve been doing for about ten years now.
Do you have any general advice for people to engage in ethical tech?
I don’t think that there’s any ethical tech in the abstract, so anytime we think and talk about ethical tech or AI ethics, we have to look at and think about specific use cases. I don’t think we should really talk about AI anymore, and instead talk about specific types of technologies in the application because it adds confusion. As a philosopher, I think it’s important to get clear about what we mean by things because otherwise it’s easy to get confused. For example, with trustworthy AI, I don’t think that trust should necessarily be a goal of AI ethics. I could tell you to trust me and I could be someone who you shouldn’t trust, but whether people trust something or not tells us nothing about whether it is a good or bad thing.
