My undergraduate engineering education was at a fairly religious school, and the last semester of the program involved a course called "technology and society".

My undergraduate engineering education was at a fairly religious school, and the last semester of the program involved a course called "technology and society". The material was largely from the typical secular sources, including Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. The particular perspective shared by the engineering department, and which I find helpful in thinking about this, comes from the Dutch religious philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd. He broke down human experience and society into a hierarchy of maybe 15 so-called "spheres", each less abstract than the one nested below, and each influencing the one above. In this conceptualization the physical realities of the universe affect, for example, what we can invent. But we make choices in making inventions, and those choices affect how our inventions are used, and those uses affect society and culture. This thought structure doesn't perfectly capture the interactions of law and society on how objects are used, but it does seem good job of explaining the role of a technologist in shaping society. Sure, we can't prevent people from using our inventions for ill. But we can build them in ways that promote positive uses.