Engineering Activity in the Context of Humanitarian Thinking

With the release of a package of state-level regulatory documents during the perestroika years, which set a new vector for the development of domestic education and, among other things, set the task of enriching the ideological, theoretical, humanitarian content of higher education, the reform of the country’s higher education began, which continues in waves to this day. The powerful flow of articles, reports, dissertations devoted to the humanization and humanitarization of engineering education, which has gushed since that time, does not weaken. The experiment has shown that artificial intelligence ChatGPT-4 generally gives an adequate idea of the current issues in this area of engineering pedagogy. In the article, for the first time, this task is projected on the formation of students’ engineering thinking of a humanitarian orientation, which is necessary to ensure their effectiveness in the labor market in especially cardinal changes in technology and the organization of engineering activities, used with an exponentially growing scale of the use of artificial intelligence and robotics in it. The idea is being developed that engineering thinking is inherently inseparable from the humanitarian one, which sets its direction, and the idea put forward by P.G. Shchedrovitsky’s hypothesis about programming as a dominant way of thinking of an engineer in an emerging new technological formation, which is based on goal setting with the subsequent design of an “activity tree” as a projection of a tree of goals. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the regularity of the organic strengthening of the humanitarian focus of engineering thinking in the course of the ongoing industrial revolution and the need to focus engineering pedagogy on this trend, based on the author’s proposed refinements of ontologically established ideas about engineering activities.