The Aftershock of the Old

After reading a couple of my posts on AI that invoked comparisons with technologies in the rural environment (Hedging Your Bets on AI) and the music industry (The Needle and the Damage Done) a friend suggested that The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton might be interesting to me.

It was.

The key theme of the book is that we tend to be beguiled by the invention, possibility, and novelty of technology rather than by its value, usage, or availability. This leads to some warped perspectives. For example, we lose sight of technology long before it becomes obsolete, we devalue the old whatever its longevity and residual value in favour of the potential of the new, and we focus on the rich, modern, industrialised elite, rather than the day-to-day reality of most of the world's population.

The adoption and availability of technology is not uniform in time, society, or geography. William Gibson famously captured the essence of this idea in his pithy quote “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet” which also bundles the idea that Silicon Valley's today is the future, and that it will push our today into the past.

Many of us also do this kind of thing, despite ample evidence that neither of those claims is guaranteed. Take a modern carpenter's workshop which could easily include a hammer (technology which is arguably several million years old) alongside motorised lathes (hundreds) and laser spirit levels or etching machinery (tens). Tools from across the ages: the practical outweighs the novel for those at the sharp end.

Edgerton observes that the value of yesterday's tech can be rediscovered when there is some kind of problem. Those candles are handy when there's a power cut, for example, but this scenario is "... much less common now in rich countries than in the past because of the increasing reliability of systems." (p. 11)

According to the book, a standard, blinkered, twentieth century tech timeline would cover, say, electricity, mass production, aerospace, nuclear power, the internet and the pill. It suggests, and gives extensive justification for, an alternative roll call including the rickshaw, the condom, the sewing machine, the spinning wheel, the Haber-Bosch process, the hydrogenation of coal, bikes, corrugated iron, the chainsaw, and the refrigerator.

A chapter on warfare argues against the claimed contribution of conflict to the creation of technology, riffing on a quote that leaps off the page in the introduction: "The horse made a greater contribution to the Nazi [WW2] effort than the V2." (p. xii) Later, a kind of innovation survivor bias is invoked: "We do not have a history of invention, but instead histories of the invention of only some of the technologies which were later successful." (p. 184)

So, if we are to abandon the false metrics of innovation and novelty, how should we replace them to understand the significance of technology in its historical context? Edgerton has an answer: "Economic historians of technology ... argue that [the significance of technology] is the difference between the cost or benefit of using [it] and that of the best alternative". (p. 5)

This is clearly not an objective measure (cost or benefit to who? best according to what criteria?) but at least reminds us that a new technology is not usually providing a way to do something that had no earlier analogue. Railways had advantages, but we should not compare them to a scenario where no goods can move anywhere but rather to canals or horse-drawn carts.

Edgerton is mostly concerned with an historical viewpoint, where the later-stage value of an invention might be seen long after the date of its inception, and very differently to how it was intended to impact the world. James Burke is also very good on this point in his Connections series from the 1970s which seeks to play down the idea of linear innovation in favour of evolution and cross-pollination.

In our daily work we don't have the same luxury of hindsight but the notion of significance can still be worth keeping in mind when thinking about how we do software. We can ask ourselves what this change is bringing to our customers relative to their next best alternative. As the book says: "the question is not what computers do, but how well they do it, and what they can do that cannot be done otherwise" (p.7)

In a recent interview, the renowned music producer Fatboy Slim was blunt about why he stuck with his ancient Atari ST and its software sequencer, Creator, long past the point at which its novelty had worn off for most: "I've got my technology. It does everything that I need it to do ... So, I didn't upgrade. And then they invented Cubase and Logic and stuff like that. And I stayed on Creator until I got a laptop, which was probably 30 years later."

To reiterate: for many practitioners there needs to be an aspect of the new that makes it worth their while, and that includes overcoming the inertia of change. Just because someone invented something different that was used somewhere for something it does not follow that the thing has practical value to anyone or that it was widely used anywhere for anything at that time.

-00--

David Edgerton wrote The Shock of the Old 20 years ago, long before LLM-powered agents had motivated the layoff of large portions of the workforce or hacked into government departments. In spite of that, passages like this feel eerily prescient: "Machines replaced domestic servants, changing the role of the middle-class housewife from supervisor of workers to machine-operator ... this led not to a decrease in work, but rather to increased domestic production." (p.31)

He reached back a further 30 years to quote from Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology: "In almost no instance can artificial-rational systems be built and left alone. They require continued attention, rebuilding, and repair. Eternal vigilance is the price of artificial complexity". (p.75-6).

We started this post with AI and it feels right to end on it too, noting that just as last week's and yesterday's tools can sit justifiably on today's workbench, so last week's and yesterday's commentary can remain relevant to today's tech. Shock followed by aftershock.

Meet Me Halfway?

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answ...

How do I Test AI?

Recently a few people have asked me how I test AI. I'm happy to share my experiences, but I frame the question more broadly, perhaps something like this: what kinds of things do I consider when testing systems with artificial intelligence components . I freestyled liberally the first time I answered but when the question came up again I thought I'd write a few bullets to help me remember key things. This post is the latest iteration of that list. Caveats: I'm not an expert; what you see below is a reminder of things to pick up on during conversations so it's quite minimal; it's also messy; it's absolutely not a guide or a set of best practices; each point should be applied in context; the categories are very rough; it's certainly not complete. Also note that I work with teams who really know what they're doing on the domain, tech, and medical safety fronts and some of the things listed here are things they'd typically do some or all of. Testing ...

The Best Programmer Dan Knows

I was pairing with my friend Vernon at work last week, on a tool I've been developing. He was smiling broadly as I talked him through what I'd done because we've been here before. The tool facilitates a task that's time-consuming, inefficient, error-prone, tiresome, and important to get right. Vern knows that those kinds of factors trigger me to change or build something, and that's why he was struggling not to laugh out loud. He held himself together and asked a bunch of sensible questions about the need, the desired outcome, and the approach I'd taken. Then he mentioned a talk by Daniel Terhorst-North, called The Best Programmer I Know, and said that much of it paralleled what he sees me doing. It was my turn to laugh then, because I am not a good programmer, and I thought he knew that already. What I do accept, though, is that I am focussed on the value that programs can give, and getting some of that value as early as possible. He sent me a link to the ta...

Notes on Testing Notes

Ben Dowen pinged me and others on Twitter last week , asking for "a nice concise resource to link to for a blog post - about taking good Testing notes." I didn't have one so I thought I'd write a few words on how I'm doing it at the moment for my work at Ada Health, alongside Ben. You may have read previously that I use a script to upload Markdown-based text files to Confluence . Here's the template that I start from: # Date + Title # Mission # Summary WIP! # Notes Then I fill out what I plan to do. The Mission can be as high or low level as I want it to be. Sometimes, if deeper context might be valuable I'll add a Background subsection to it. I don't fill in the Summary section until the end. It's a high-level overview of what I did, what I found, risks identified, value provided, and so on. Between the Mission and Summary I hope that a reader can see what I initially intended and what actually...

On Herding Cats

Last night I was at the Cambridge Tester meetup for a workshop on leadership. It was a two-parter with Drew Pontikis facilitating conversation about workplace scenarios followed by an AMA with a group of experienced managers. I can't come to work this week, my cat died. Drew opened by asking us what our first thoughts would be as managers on seeing that sentence. Naturally, sadness and sympathy, followed by a week ? for a cat ? and I only got a day for my gran! Then practicalities such as maybe there's company policy that covers that , and then the acknowledgement that it's contextual: perhaps this was a long-time emotional support animal . Having established that management decisions are a mixture of emotion, logic, and contingency Drew noted that most of us don't get training in management or leadership then split us into small groups and confronted us with three situations to talk through: Setting personal development goals for others. Dropping a clange...

Reasonable Doubt

In Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work Simon Willison writes: As software engineers we ... need to deliver code that works — and we need to include proof that it works as well. He is coming at this from the perspective of LLM-assisted coding, but most of what he says applies in general. I think this is a reasonable consise summary of his requirements for developers: Manual happy paths: get the system into an initial state, exercise the code, check that it has the desired effect on the state. Manual edge cases: no advice given, just a note that skill here is a sign of a senior engineer. Automated tests: should demonstrate the change like Manual happy paths but also fail if the change is reverted. He notes that, even though LLM tooling can write automated tests, it's humans who are accountable for the code and it's on us to "include evidence that it works as it should." Coincidentally, just the week before I read his post I told one of my...

Vanilla Flavour Testing

I have been pairing with a new developer colleague recently. In our last session he asked me "is this normal testing?" saying that he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else that he'd worked. We finished the task we were on and then chatted about his question for a few minutes. This is a short summary of what I said. I would describe myself as context-driven . I don't take the same approach to testing every time, except in a meta way. I try to understand the important questions, who they are important to, and what the constraints on the work are. With that knowledge I look for productive, pragmatic, ways to explore whatever we're looking at to uncover valuable information or find a way to move on. I write test notes as I work in a format that I have found to be useful to me, colleagues, and stakeholders. For me, the notes should clearly state the mission and give a tl;dr summary of the findings and I like them to be public while I'm working not just w...

Why Test, Test What, Then How?

There was a time when testing was all about the mnemonics . Well, we had no AI back then so thinking about our human craft and how to share what we had learned using our human intelligence with other engaged humans for later recall in their human heads seemed important. But this post isn't about dumping on AI. It isn't about mnemonics either even if WTTWTH does look like something that'd fit well into that ancient world. No, this post is just a snappier version of what I said to my team this week when I was walking through some testing I'd done the day before. It was concerned with a change to a particular turn in the dialog system we're building where multiple variables are in play, some populated by an external call to an LLM service. I wanted to make the point that the bulk of the testing work was done in the research I did and the spreadsheet I made, not in the interaction with our product. That spreadsheet was the result of me looking in our service's cod...

Open Your Mind

Jerome Groopman, in How Doctors Think , reviews ways in which doctors can make poor choices, identifies potential causes, and suggests some practices, for both doctor and patient, that can help to prevent them. I find this interesting for a couple of reasons: first, I work in the health space, although not in a therapeutic area and, second, I like to reflect on my own thought processes. I'll take three broad themes from Groopman's analysis: the business of healthcare and how that impacts a physician's ability to practice; the doctor-patient relationship and how that impacts the experience of both sides; and the cognitive failings that impact a correct and timely diagnosis for any given patient. Naturally, these overlap. The book is written from the perspective of the notoriously commercialised American medical system and is around 20 years old, so doubtless some of the details are different outside of the US and have changed since pu...

LLEWT 2024

This weekend I was at LLEWT 2024, a peer conference on Anglesey , north Wales, discussing communication. Given the day jobs of the participants, it was no surprise that the experience reports and the conversations that followed them mostly focussed on software development contexts. Notes from my presentation are in Express, Listen, and Field . I made sketchnotes (below) for each presentation and a mindmap (above) to try to summarise the whole. Without much reflection yet, I guess I would pull these common high-level threads from the day: There are multiple reasons that communication fails ... like, duh! ... but having multiple strategies for framing a message can help ... and having multiple tactics for delivering a message can help too. Understanding what you want from an interaction is key ... so setting the context to make that more likely is wise ... which might mean meta-conversation, being transparent, or changing your approach...

Hiccupps

Search This Blog