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Robots among us

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I ended up with mixed reactions to Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation by Antonio Caselli.

The powerful point it makes is the complete dependence of AI and digital technologies generally on ongoing human input. Many years ago, my husband – then a technology reporter for the BBC – was digging out the facts about a hyped dot com company called Spinvox. Its business was said not be automated voice transcription, but it turned out the work was mainly done by humans, not computers (although the story turned scratchy –  the linked post responds to the company’s points). Waiting for Robots gives many examples of apps that similarly involve cheap human labour rather than digital magic – I was surprised by this. Less surprising – and indeed covered in other books such as Madhumiat Murgia’s recent Code Dependent – is the use of humans in content moderation (remember when big social media companies used to do that?), data labelling and other services from Mechanical Turk to reinforcement learning with human feedback for LLMs.

The book also claims much more as ‘labour’ and this is where I disagree. Of course big tech benefits from my digital exhaust and from content I post online such as cute dog photos. But this seems to me categorically different from often (badly) paid employment relationships. Although the stickiness of network effects or habit might keep me on a certain service, although the companies might set the defaults so they hoover up my activity data, the power dynamics are different. I can switch, for instance from X to BlueSky, or from Amazon to my local bookstore. So I’m not a fan of portraying these types of data-provision as more ‘digital labour’.

Having said that, the book makes a compelling case that robots and humans are interdependent and will remain so. Generative AI will continue to need human-produced material (‘data’) and intervention to avert model collapse. Humans are also going to have to pay for digital services so will need to have money to pay with. Focusing on the economic dynamics involved is crucial, as it is clear that the market/platform/ecosystem structures are currently tilted towards the (owners of) robots and away from humans. So, for all that I’m not persuaded by the classification of different types of ‘digital labour’ here (and find the anti-capitalist perspective on tackling the challenges unpragmatic apart from anything else), there is a lot of food for thought in Waiting for Robots.

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The tech coup

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It’s some months since I read Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup, as she delivered the ST Lee Poicy Lecture here in Cambridge last November 11th, right after the US presidential election. Just a short time later, her warning looks even more prescient than it did on the day, as the American tech executives bend the knee at the court of Mar A Lago.

Most of the book is a descriptive analysis of how the US tech companies have come to occupy such a central role in daily life and in the politics of the west, often under the cover of “innovation” and their role in delivering economic growth. The chapters pick up on specific concerns, such as facial recognition being used by police forces as well as authoritarian regimes, misinformation on social media, the cyber insecurity due to corporate practices, and the loss of sovereignty by states other then the US. The thread running through all these is the vanishing concern for the public interest in the development and deployment of digital technology. While the issues are sadly familiar, Schaake brings the unique perspective of someone who was an MEP with responsibilities for the digital sector and now a Stanford University academic, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

The conclusion is titled, “Stop the tech coup, save democracy.” she writes, “The tech coup shifting power from public and democratic institutions to companies must stop.” But continues, “Invisibly or indirectly, a whole host of technologies is privatizing responsibilities that used to be the monopoly of the state.” As I write this post, the headlines today feature Mr Musk getting an office in the White House later this month, the European Commission ‘pausing’ its anti-trust actions against the big US tech firms under the EU DMA to consider the political ramifications, and the UK government, on the advice of a tech investor, going gung-ho on getting AI used through the public sector asap. Interestingly, yesterday I took part in a webinar at ICRIER, the Delhi-based think tank, where there was much emphasis on the direct role of the state in running digital public infrastructure. Public options must surely be a part of, not stopping, but turning back, the coup – or if you prefer a less dramatic turn of phrase, putting public interest back at the centre of innovation in this amazing technology.

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Engineers and their problems

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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.

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The Enlightened Economist Prize for 2024

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This decision – again, entirely arbitrary and my own – was harder than ever this year because I left the long/shortlisting so late I had little time to mull it over. So I’m going to follow last year’s precedent and select two: The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies and The Ordinal Society by  Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy. Both speak to my own preoccupations – measurement and decision-making – but you don’t need to be as obsessed as me to derive a lot of interest and enjoyment from both books.

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The prize is that I buy the winners lunch when we’re in the same location. I haven’t met Dan or Kieran before, but had the pleasure of meeting Marion when I visited Berkeley in the autumn. I hope to get back there to deliver the prize before too long. Dan I guess is London-based or close by and Kieran is at Duke, so please do both contact me to discuss delivery?

In case anyone is interested, here are previous winners.

Last year it was Ed Conway (Material World) and Paul Johnson (Follow the Money); in 2022 James Bessen for The New Goliaths and Brad Delong for Slouching Towrds Utopia (I saw Brad briefly in Berkeley too); in 2021 I picked Amartya Sen’s memoir A Home in the World; for 2020 it was William Quinn and John Turner with Boom or Bust. In 2019, the winner was Richard Davies with Extreme Economies.

Even earlier winners were:

2018 Kaushik Basu, The Republic Of Beliefs.

2017 Jean Tirole, Economics for the Common Good (I helped with the English translation so it got a closer read than usual!)

2016 Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

2015 Josh Angrist and Steve Pischke for Mastering Metrics

2014 David Colander and Roland Kupers, Complexity and the Art of Public Policy

In 2013 it went to Jeremy Adelman for his biography of Albert Hirschman

And the very first in 2012 went to Ariel Rubinstein’s Economic Fables.

I think they’ve all stood the test of time. And here I am at lunch with Profs Angrist and Pischke, celebrating their receipt of this important award – the prize is real! (I took them to Delaunay.)

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2024 in reading: The Enlightened Economist Prize shortlist

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There has been a long gap since my last post, which coincided with the start of Michaelmas Term – suggestive timing. Life was indeed very busy, and although I carried on reading, sitting tapping away at the laptop had diminished appeal during the autumn. However, the end of the year approaches and it’s past time to produce the shortlist for the Enlightened Economist annual prize. As ever, the contenders are books I read during the year (regardless of publication date), the selection is arbitrary, and the prize is that I offer lunch to the winner when we are in the same city.

First, a quick catch-up on relevant reading since early October (omitting the various detective novels I relax with):

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder – I rather enjoyed this, although agree with the many reviews that pointed out its lack of any analytical structures. As a cri de coeur about the precipice the world finds itself sliding over, it’s well-written and passionate. And probably too late.

Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall – this is a wonderfully informative book about the how of manufacturing by my Cambridge colleague, and also funny and super-readable. It’s out in late February – I read a proof to do a blurb. It’s the kind of book where pretty much every page has an amazing new piece of information.

The Gambling Animal by Glenn Harrison and Don Ross- out in late January, another book I read to provide a quote for. It’s a fascinating interpretation of human evolution in terms of risk taking and the way short-term socially-successful risk-taking piles up long-term giant risks – such as extinction risks due to climate damage.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk – a now quite old biography still widely agreed to be an excellent introduction to the life and ideas of W. It was a terrific read, and probably took me as close as I will ever get to the philosophical ideas. I was particularly taken by the account of a debate between Wittgenstein and Turing in Cambridge in 1939: were mathematical propositions a ‘grammar’ (W) or statements about underlying objects (T)? I read this book because I’m giving the Wittgenstein Lectures in Bayreuth in June 2025, about the use of ML/AI in public decisions.

Equality: WHat it is and why it matters by Thomas Piketty & Michael Sandel – out very soon, this is a transcript of TP being interviewed by MS, the latter mildly challenging the former about some of his views on the reason it’s important to attack inequality. It’s a nice summary of their mainly shared views but less interesting due to the fact that they fundamentally agree with each other, so the debates are over relatively minor points.

Now for the long/shortlist – in no special order (but with a few obvious themes). Two marked * are by colleagues of mine:

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing – Scott Shapiro (my mini-review)

AI Snake Oil – Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (my review)

The Atomic Human – Neil Lawrence* (my review)

AI Needs You – Verity Harding* (my review)

The Tech Coup – Marietje Schaake (I haven’t written this up

Underground Empire – Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman (my review)

The Ordinal Society – Marion Fourcade & Kieran Healy (my review)

The Unaccountability Machine – Dan Davies (my review)

The Grid – Gretchen Baake (my review)

How Infrastructure Works – Deb Chachra (my review)

Cuckooland – Tom Burgis (I didn’t write about this – a very readable and shocking account of the way London is – as we all know – a haven for global criminality and corruption)

Kaput – Wolfgang Munchau (haven’t written this up yet – it’s out last month)

Late Soviet Britain – Abby Innes (my mini-review)

Failed State – Sam Freedman (my review)

The Tyranny of Nostalgia – Russell Jones (my review)

Winner to be revealed in the next few days. But finally, a reminder that my next book, The Measure fo Progress, is out in April! It’s made the New Scientist list of best books to look out for in 2025.

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