I’ve been letting these posts about my reading slip recently, for reasons of general busy-ness. The last thing I want to do of an evening or lunchbreak is more sitting at my screen, especially in such lovely sunny weather. Still, time to return with a recommendation for a lovely memoir. It’s Turn Left by Illah Nourbakhsh, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon.
The book isn’t about computers and AI, or very little. It is the story of an immigrant from Iran to the US at a young age, and the book begins with how – interesting – his original nationality makes it to fly in and out of the US (this was written well before Trump). There follows what is in many ways a classic immigrant tale – the navigation between two cultures, striving for and achieving success – and it’s a beautifully written story. Nourbakhsh writes: “Every immigrant who has lived here for decades spends much of their time in a self-constructed bubble, with friends and collagues who almost never bring up the whole immigrant thing. But the boundary moments are an exception, when we operate outside our constructed social networks and suddenly become immigrants again.”
However, the book does end with his work in the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon, whose motivation he describes as follows: “I was constantly troubled by the collision of complex ideas [in this case about autonomous vehicles] and what I saw as the technologists’ Achilles heel: a total lack of reflection regarding systems-level change and unintended consequences.” The CREATE Lab for community robotics was established to counter such techno-optimism; it takes on technology projects co-produced with the community – although as he points out, funders tend to want big and shiny tech projects rather than community-scale ones.
One example is a community project to measure illegal emissions of pollutants from a factory; the data gathered through sensor systems and analysis, linking the plant to local asthma and cardiovascular disease, eventually led to its closure. Nourbakhsh writes: “This is a story of community empowerment – of rebalancing the broken power structures in our society that provide privilege, expertise and believability to corporations and government over the people. It is totally unacceptable that rebalancing such inequity requires years of work and foundation funding for a technology lab in a university; but that is the fight we choose to embrace.”
Cue loud cheers. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I love its author’s philopsophy of life – it ends with the idea of ‘left turns’, the unanticipated changes of direction in career or life; or there’s the imperative to “move at the speed of trust,” without breaking things. I read the book in proof last autumn; it makes for poignant reading now the rich and powerful have tipped the balance back in their own favour in the US. But all the more important to have reminders like this about the right direction.
