Tag Archives: review

Social machines

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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.

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The political economy of horses for courses

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It was the fact of a lecture by Dan Breznitz at the University of Manchester for National Productivity Week that alerted me to his book Innovation in Real Places. Sadly I couldn’t get to Manchester for the lecture but I really recommend the book. Its core argument is that the shape of innovative businesses depends on the specifics of their economic context, making the hope to become the next Silicon Valley a forlorn one for most places, and requiring innovation policy to be appropriately tailored.

The aims of innovation policy are common: make sure companies and individuals concerned have the capabilities they need, and support the whole cosystem in which they operate. There are also several policy fundamentals: ensure local firms are plugged into production networks (including internationally); provide the necessary public goods (skills, prototyping production facilities, trade shows…); focus on the whole local ecosystem including whether financing and business models cohere; adjust policy over time as the ecosystem grows.

Given the basics, the book sets out four different pathways with examples about how specific places have followed each. The one that dominates the innovation policy imaginary is the Silicon valley model – frontier innovation, VC finance, star entrepreneurs. (This is looking less good than it did a while ago. And as the book comments in the introduction, “There is nothing like a dosage of competition to shake comfortable oligopolies out of their stranglehold on power.”) Tech startups – like all startups – require extensive social networks, but in this sector they are geographically extended rather than locally-rooted. So even if a Silicon-whatever gets going, the people involved may end up moving to Menlo Park or Mountain View when they succeed – the book gives an example of a tech cluster starting successfully in Atlanta, Georgia, but subsequently moving away. The book argues that the conditions for such clusters are rare in any case, and that the model leads to inequality rather than broad-based prosperity and good jobs in the region.

The second model is the design, prototyping and production engineering stage, with Taiwan being the exaplar. The third is innovation in components and second generation products, “the unsung and despised hero of economic growth,” with examples in Germany and some in China. The final model is production and assembly, so successfully adopted in China’s Pearl River delta region, with extremely successful innovation in modes of production, assembly and also logistics.

Having set out these broad models, the rest of the book is packed with examples of innovation policies both good and bad. As it points out, much policy thinking is lazy. If it gets beyond the aim of being the next Silicon Valley, “one of the most comon ways for regions to fail is to focus on the trendiest complementarity, be it venture capital, university parks, green tech or AI.” Prof Breznitz’s key message is that there is no substitute for detail, and indeed constant willingness to adjust policies as circumstances change. The book identifies a core political challenge: successful innovation policies often succeed by flying below the radar of political attention, but if they do succeed there’s no avoiding that politicization – and rightly so in many ways. Innovation policy is hard enough to get right, but the political economy challenge may be harder still.

Anyway, a wise book, lots of great examples, and hopefully the lecture will go online before long.

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Swings and roundabouts – or slides?

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When you’ve seen as many ups and downs in the ranking of countries’ economic models as I have, it’s no surprise to learn that what was considered a sure-fire recipe for success at one time is portrayed as stagnation or sclerosis a decade or two later. The perceptions amplify relatively small differences in GDP growth, as the western economies tend to exhibit the same broad trends. Still, Wolfgang Munchau’s Kaput: The end of the German miracle was surprising. (although so were my recent experiences with German trains mobile coverage).

The book – which is very well written – argues that German policymakers made some strategic bets some decades ago that have backfired significantly over time: dependence on Russian energy, underinvestment, over-reliance on parts of the manufacturing sector as China has gained ground – in electric vehicle production for example – and a failure to keep up with digital technology. It emphasises the reliance on technologies that the digital and green transitions are simply rendering redundant – the internal combustion engine prominent among them. The effectively mercantilist system of political prioritisation and finance has continued to support the country’s traditional strengths rather than anything innovative that might cannibalise those famous manufacturing companies. In fact, the list of charges is long – out-of-date skills, a labour market that cannot well accommodate expanding sources of labour supply (women, over-60s, immigrants) because of the vocational and apprenticeship structures, a weak digital infrastructure, and of course a disastrous energy policy over many years.

Is this really the end of the German miracle, or another of those episodes when what looks like a fatal weakness one decade will turn out to be just what is needed the next? As the author says in the prologue, “A British journalist and friend of mine warned me not to write this book. He said that the over-arching lesson in his professional life has never been to bet against the German economy.” The 5G is terrible and the trains are worse than ours in the UK, but German towns are still visibly more prosperous than many of their British counterparts. On the other hand, people still generally use cash – the ATM at the airport in Hamburg a while ago gave me a €100 note, which is just unimaginable in other European countries. And people aren’t using the apps so familiar to us to navigate or find a restaurant because they just won’t load over the terrible mobile networks.

So I don’t know whether the German miracle is permanently broken or not but this is an eye-opening read. And of course there’s the message Germany’s voters are about to send the country’s political establishment next month – whatever it turns out to be.

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The social life of ideas

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I re-read a book I first read in 2002 when the first UK paperback was published, Louis Menand’s magnificent The Metaphysical Club: A story of ideas in America. It takes a sweeping view of the reshaping of the climate of ideas in the US after the Civil War, when pre-war traditions were replaced thanks to a combination of influences: the professionalisation of intellectual life in universities, the impact of scientific discovery particularly Darwin, and indeed the consequences of the Union victory. By the late 19th century the broadly defined pragmatist perspective that lasted until the 1960s – including an accommodation among White Americans over the status of African-Americans – was in place. The story is told though the intertwined histories of William James, Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey.

The book lived up to my memory of its excellence, although newly poignant as the idea of an intellectual life among the new US ruling class seems increasingly like a contradiction in terms. I picked out moments that speak to my current preoccupations. For example, on the impact of The Origin of Species, that it emphasized difference or variation as an organising principle, not common characteristics. Some quotes that seem particularly relevant now: Everything human beings do by choice rather than by instinct, and course of conduct they choose when they might have chosen differently, is a moral action.”

William James arguing that society is the fact of life, and the idea of a non-social individual is pure abstraction, while Dewey agreed that there are no individuals without society: “Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing.” Holmes meanwhile argued that experience – which defines the practice of justice – “is social, not psychological”, his construct of how the ‘reasonable man’ would judge being defined with respect to society.

Menand concludes: “Everything James and Dewey wrote as pragmatists boils down to a single claim: people are the agents of their own destinies. They dispel the fatalism that haunts almost every 19th century system of thought. … What Holmes did not share with those thinkers was their optimism. He did not believe that the experimental spirit will necessarily lead us, ultimately, down the right path. Democracy is an experiment, and it is in the nature of experiments sometimes to fail.” As he had seen it fail as a combatant in the Civil War.

Of course it won’t do to project today’s angst directly onto a 20+ year old book. But it is a brilliant and highly relevant read.

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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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