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.

My friend Wendy Hall co-authored a 2019 book The Theory and Practice of Social Machines, which I read only recently. The central idea of a social machine is very interesting – a social network connected by digital devices, a human-machine social entity at scale. These can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in terms of societal outcomes, and most of the book is concerned with this question: “If we take the metaphor of the ‘social machine’ seriously, then we can think of it as doing some computing, and hence processing information, which can be done more or less accurately.” Well, it’s only too obvious how that is going at the moment.

So the book asks how should one analyse social machines and, importantly, try to construct or shape them? When do you get filter bubbles or groupthink, and when robustly diverse engagement towards a common aim? The middle chunk of chapters looks at many examples of social machines in operation, in areas ranging from music to social media to healthcare to open data. It ends, in a somewhat unsatisfactory way, with a list of questions or areas for future research, and with the conclusion: “Social machines should prompt neither optimism nor pessimism; they will enable new types of problem solving and new types of mischief alike.”

I do think the metaphor can be fruitful, but I suppose with the mischief aspect so much more evident 6 years after the book‘s publication I hungered for something a bit more action-oriented.

I bought Wicked Problems: How to engineer a better world by Guru Madhavan because of a column by the author in the FT, The Truth About Maximising Efficiency: it argues that governments, like engineered artefacts and indeed our bodies need some redundancy and safety marging. How true!

I enjoyed reading the book but in terms of analysis didn’t get much out of it beyond the FT column. It advocates a systems engineering approach even to ‘hard’ problems ie. well-definable ones. It classifies problems into hard (solvable), soft (only resolvable) and messy (need redefining) and takes wicked problems as the union of these categories. It was interesting to me to read a critique of engineering similar to the one I apply to economics, namely that engineers too often ignore the normative or political context for their solutions. The book sort of makes the case that engineering is social but not in a particularly clear way.

Having said that, the book has lots of examples of messiness and wickedness from the world of engineering, and particularly aircraft training and engineering. It focuses on the career of Ed Link – whom I had never heard of – who went from making player pianos to inventing the first on the ground flight training simulator to inventing and building submersible vessels. The book is full of the kind of fact that pleases me no end – for example that black boxes are orange and were created by Lockheed Air Services along with food company General Mills and a waste disposal company, Waste King. Also – tragically relevant – that engines are tested for resilience against bird strikes by lobbing chickens at them – real birds rather than imitation ones, and freshly killed rather than frozen and defrosted. A cited paper by John Downer, When the Chick Hits the Fan, observes that birds have adapted to devices meant to scare them away, so there is a sort of arms race between engineers and birds. (The paper is fascinating – there is an expert debate about how many birds of what size and being lobbed in how fast constitute an adequate test. The resulting pulp is known as ‘snarge’.)

Most of the examples of wicked problems in the book involve engineering rather than social problems. On the one hand, that’s an issue because we tend to think of wicked problems as social and political – paying for the groing need for adult social care, for example, On the other hand, the one main example of that type, reducing homelessness among veterans in the US, discusses how to get the different agencies and stakeholder to talk to each other and respect their differences. but doesn’t in the end describe a solution. Perhaps the moral one is meant to take is that wicked problems don’t have a solution?

All in all, an enjoyable read, and I for one am on board with systems engineering approaches, resilience and organisational flexibility.