Technological progress in Software Engineering, Distributed Systems and AI is accelerating social, political and economic change at an unprecedented pace. In addition to my theoretical research on the mathematical foundations of computer science (logic, category theory) I am also interested in the impact that software engineering has on society.
One of the many important question that our civilization faces (which include climate change and biodiversity loss) is the interplay of technology and democracy. Much is being written about democratic decline and how it is related to changing technology.
My current working titles for this topic are (most recent last) Democratic Governance, Macrofoundations of Software Engineering, Technology and Culture, Designing Algorithms for Cooperation, Cooperative Systems Science, Cooperative Decision Theory (now we circled back to Democratic Governance). I recently summed up some questions in a lecture Challenges in Software Engineering.
With the rise of generative AI, all of this also has an AI angle. Here are three questions:
- Can there be a mathematical theory of human behaviour that does not model people as machines?
- Can we define a notion of human intelligence that distinguishes human intelligence from machine intelligence?
- Once we develop machines that show human intelligence, what will distinguish people from machines?
In the following, I list some books that help me to understand the issues. The principles that guide my search for solutions can be summarized by three well-known slogans: Jevons paradox which tells us not be blinded by economic promises of growth and technological promises of higher efficiency, Gall’s law which emphasizes the importance of choosing the right direction rather than to hope for revolutionary change, and Goodhart’s law which implies that markets alone do not solve problems and that any solution must build on democracy, diversity and inclusion.
Currently Reading
(I got most of the below as audiobooks, preferably from libro.fm.)
- Richard Evans The Pursuit of Power A history of Europe 1815-1914. The institutions that form the basis of modern society (liberalism, nationalism, “deep” state, representative democracy, freedom of speech, public education, end of slavery and serfdom, etc) were largely put in place during the conservative reaction after Napoleon. These times are much more alive today than I previously thought.
- Richard Evans. The Coming of the Third Reich
- Christopher Clark. The Sleepwalkers
- Chris Gosden. Magic
- Ellen Wood. The Origin of Capitalism
- Ira Stoll. Samuel Adams
- Walter Lippmann. Public Opinion
- Edward Bernays. Propaganda
- Osterhammel, Petersson. Geschichte der Globalisierung
- Merlin Sheldrake. Entangled Life
- John Darwin (2008) After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405.
- danah boyd (2014) it’s complicated - the social lives of networked teens
- Jean Twenge (2023) Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future
- Edward Foley (2020) Presidential Elections and Majority Rule: The Rise, Demise, and Potential Restoration of the Jeffersonian Electoral
- Christopher Clark (2014) The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
- Robert Darnton (2023) The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789.
- Robert Darnton (2015) Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature.
- Robert Darnton (1984) The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History.
- Robert Putnam (2020) The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. A history of individualism vs communitarianism in the US from 1890 to 2020.
- Lee Vinsel, Andrew L. Russell (2020) The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most What is technology? What role does maintenance vs innovation play in technology-based prosperity?
- Sherry Turkle (2011) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
- H W Brands (2009) Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
- Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction.
- Sean B Carroll (2016) The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters. Keystone species, trophic cascades, cancer, … which regulations allow human and animal bodies to survive? Which of these regulatory mechanisms scale to whole ecosystems? How is this knowledge used to support the health both of individuals and of societies? film, video lecture.
- Sean B Carroll (2005) Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom What can we learn from embryology about biological evolution and the organization of cooperation?
- David Lewis, Wim Vandekerckhove (2011) Whistleblowing and Democratic Values.
- Danny Dorling (2020) Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration … animation
- Tim Wu (2016) The Attention Merchants. A history of advertising from 1833 until today.
- Cory Doctorow (2023) The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation An account on how Big Tech created monopolies and the importance of interoperability.
- Patrick Sharkey (2018) Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence. How did American society organize to start bringing down crime rates in the 1990s?
- Eric J. Johnson (2021) The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters
- Evolutionary Psychology (and related fields):
- Robert Trivers (2011) The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Intelligence evolved as an armsrace between deceivers and detectors and self-deception evolved to counter detection. What does this tell us about social media and current politics?
- David Buss (2016) Evolutionary Psychology
- Joseph LeDoux (2019) The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
- Robert Sapolski (2017) Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
- Robert Wright (1995) Moral Animal
- Cecilia Hayes (2018) Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking.
- Menelaos Apostolou (2017) Sexual Selection in Homo sapiens - Parental Control over Mating and the Opportunity Cost of Free Mate Choice.
- Economics:
- Mancur Olson (1982) The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidness.
- History:
- Ed Conway (2014) The Summit. A history of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement.
- Peter Turchin (2023) End times: elites, counter-elites, and the path of political disintegration. Are popular immiseration and elite overproduction two of the most significant factors in the decline of states?
- Joe Studwell (2013) How Asia Works: Success and Failure In the World’s Most Dynamic Region. An economic history of industrialization. Why does successful industrialization start with land reform and proctectionism? What implications do these insights have on economic theory?
- Zephyr Teachout (2014) Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.
- David Montgomery (2007) Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. A history of how the loss of agricultural soil contributed to the collapse of civilizations.
- Josiah Ober (2017) Demopolis - Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice. “I hope to show liberals why it is wrong to regard citizen participation in government as a cost that can or should be minimized. And that it is a mistake to view a preference for citizen self-government and a fear of government captured by self-interested elites as uniquely appropriate to populists, anarchists, or Schmittian agonists.” What can we learn from ancient Athens about democratic resilience?
- Patricia Nelson Limerick (1987) The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. What does the wild west teach us about the “wild web”?
- David M. Potter (1976) The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861.
- Richard Rothstein (2018) The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
- Patrick Sharkey (2013) Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality.
- Noah Feldman. The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President. 2017.
- Science:
- Nessa Carey (2012) The Epigenetics Revolution - How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance. What interplay between genetic and epigenetic factors explains how a growing organism self-regulates?
- Geoffrey West (2017) Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies. What are the quantitative laws (network effects,…) shared by vastly different complex systems such as animals and cities? What do they tell us about growth as a special case of scaling phenomenon?
- Michael Graziano (2019) Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience.
- Philosophy:
- Hannah Arendt (1963) On Revolution. A philosophical history of modernity and how it was shaped by the American and French revolutions.
- Martha Nussbaum (2011) Creating Capabilities - The Human Development Approach.
- Martha Nussbaum (2018) The Monarchy of Fear - A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis.
- Technology:
- Yochai Benkler (2011) The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest. How does economic theory explain the success of open source software?
- Schweik and English (2012) Internet Success - A Study of Open-Source Software Commons.
- Matthew Jackson (2019) The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors.
- Bruce Schneier (2023) A Hacker’s Mind - How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back.
- Ben Buchanan. The Hacker and the State - Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics. (2020). Will AI make governments and other technology-based organizations more fragile?
US History
The United States have run an amazing experiment in democratic governance. How did it come about and can we make it work in the future?
- Matt Stoller (2019) Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. A history of the rise and decline of anti-trust politics in the US. Particularly relevant wrt the ongoing anti-trust case against Google.
- Binyamin Appelbaum (2019) The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society. A history ofthegrowing influence of economists on politics and the new ideas they brought in: low inflation is more important thanlowunemployment, tax cuts always grow the economy, free markets and deregulation solve all problems, etc.
- Nicholas Lemann (2019) Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream. A history of the rise ofcorporate power in American politics.
- Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) How Democracies Die. On which social norms does the survival of democracies depend? Did the norms that sustained US democracy rest on racial exclusion?
- Rosa Brooks (2017) How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon. Why is the military the only trusted planned-economy big-government institution in the US?
- Keri Leigh Merritt (2017) Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. How did race and class intersect in American politics of the civil war period?
The Alignment Problem (Technology/Society/Ethics)
How does technology drive societal change? How can we align technology (and the economy) to human values?
- Anna Lembke. Dopamine Nation. (2021). How much of our economy is based on addiction?
- Brian Christian. The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values. (2020). A history and almost-textbook of machine learning with an emphasis on how to align machine learning with human values. Author’s summary of the book. Is there something to learn about how to align with human values the economy and finance (both increasingly driven by algorithms and AI)?
- Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019). Will the information age empower people and democratize knowledge or lead to corporate control of the human experience? Who owns the means of behavioural modification?
- Virginia Eubanks. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. (2018) What happens when you are targeted by algorithmic decision-making tools? How widespread is the use of digital decision making for surveillance and oppression? How can we build technology that can build technology that supports justice? (Btw, intended or not, this book contains a strong argument for universal basic income.) Interview with the author.
Business
- David Gelles (2022) The Man Who Broke Capitalism. How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy. How was Milton Friedman’s shareholder-value economics put into practice?
- Nick Bilton (2017) American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road. The Ross Ulbricht story is interesting because it has two contrasting narratives. One has Ulbricht as a fighter for free markets and the rights of the individual who was crushed by an all powerful government. The other is that libertarianism taken to its logical conclusion ends in organized crime. Which narrative is more convincing? Which has the greater lessons for our future?
- Parker, Van Alstyne, Choudary (2016) Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy. See also Alan B Krueger (2019) Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us about Economics and Life How platforms change business at the example of the music industry.
Collapse and Flourishing
What can the collapse of former civilizations tell us about today? How fragile is our current economic system? How close are our societies (and the natural ecosystems in which they are embedded) to tipping points? In the long run, how do we conceive of a flourishing humanity that lives in balance with the natural ecosystems on which our life depends?
- Josiah Ober. The Rise and Rall of Classical Greece (2016). “Both greatness and fall had similar causes”. Do societies have to change direction to prevent the fall?
- Acemoglu and Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. 2013. Why are some nations richer than others? The book uses the distinction between inclusive and extractive political and economic institutions to take a fresh look at world history and study how nations take different turns at critical junctures. A review.
- Bryan Ward-Perkins. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. (2006).
- Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (2005).
- Joseph A. Tainter. Collapse of Complex Societies (1988). Can the collapse of complex societies be explained by the principle of diminishing returns?
- Jason Hickel. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2021).
- Kate Raworth. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (2017). Is an economic system possible that respects planetary boundaries and provides for the basic needs of everybody?
- Jeremy Lent. The Patterning Instinct (2017). A cultural history from hunter-gatherers to modern times. Which cultural traits are at the root of our current problems and which would set up humanity for a flourishing future?
- Jaron Lanier. Who Owns the Future (2013). How do we have to change the algorithms governing the internet and other digital and social networks to distribute power and wealth in a way that works for the average citizen?
Geopolitics
- Peter Zeihan. The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. (2022). What do geography and demography tell us about how different countries will fare in a post-growth world?
- Ben Buchanan. The Hacker and the State - Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics. (2020). Will AI make governments and other technology-based organizations more fragile?
- John Mearsheimer. The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities. (2018). Mearsheimer starts out with “There was so much optimism in the early 1990s about America’s role in the world. I wanted to figure out what went wrong.” He argues that the two strongest forces in geopolitics are nationalism and realism and that even well-intentioned liberalism does more harm than good in foreign politics. Reviews.
Economics
Are our societies able to take global warming seriously as long as corporate interests dominate politics? Is rising inequality an inevitable consequence of our current economic system? Are capitalism and democracy compatible in the long run?
- Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. Chokepoint Capitalism. 2022. Does copyright help content creators or publishing monopsonies/monopolies?. Audiobook on Libro.fm. The authors interviewed. Btw, if you watch videos with the Brave browser the adverts get cut out automatically.
- George Monbiot. Regenesis - Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet (2022). Can innovations such as precision fermentation lead to a sustainable agriculture feeding the world without plowing, pesticides and fertilizers?
- Kathryn Judge. Direct: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source (2022). Review.
- Eric Posner and Glen Weyl. Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (2018).
- Mariana Mazzucato. The Value of Everything: Makers and Takers in the Global Economy (2018). Which economic activities create value? How can we distinguish value creators from rent extractors?
- Jean Tirole. Economics for the common good. 2017.
- CORE - The Economy (2017). A mainstream economic textbook that does not hide the problems of our current economic system.
- Diane Coyle. GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (2014).
- Thomas Piketty. Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013). What can we learn from a detailed data-driven history of economic inequality? The Elephant Curve.
- Mariana Mazzucato. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Myths in Risk and Innovation (2013). How much innovation is due to the state and how much due to the private sector?
- Amartya Sen. Inequality Reexamined. (1995)
Anthropology
Why did humans evolve to cooperate? Why did humans evolve the ability to reason? In which societies and institutional frameworks does cooperation flourish? How do culture and psychology and economics influence each other?
- Joseph Henrich. The WEIRDest People in the World (2020). How did human cognition and psychology co-evolve with culture? How is European civilisation peculiar? What role did the Church play in European cultural evolution?
- Bart Wilson. The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind. (2020) What is property? Do animals have property? How is the human notion of property different and how did it evolve? Under which conditions does property help to create order and prosperity?
- Michael Tomasello. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (2019). In what sense are the human faculties for cooperation unique among all animals? How does human and great ape cognition differ? The Cognition of Pointing.
- Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber: The Enigma of Reason (2019). As Kahneman and colleagues have shown, humans are not very good at reasoning. So what did reason evolve for?
- Richard Wrangham. The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (2019).
- Ara Norenzayan. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. (2015).
- Kim Sterelny. The Evolved Apprentice (2012). Humans were genetically modern 200,000 years ago but culturally modern only 50,000 years ago. What happened in between? From an answer to this question emerges a sophisticated account of the mechanisms underlying human cooperation and the accumulation of cognitive capital.
- Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind (2012).
Democracy, Oligarchy, Political Science
Why is democracy declining and authoritarianism on the rise? What conditions make democracy work? Can we employ modern technology to strengthen democracy?
- Balaji Srinavasan. The Network State. (2022). Review.
- Donald Cohen. The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (2021). How did the importance of public goods disappear from our view?
- Camila Vergara. Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (2020). Is it possible to design an economic and political system that is stable against oligarchic takeover?
- Zachary Carter. The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (2020). Which economic system best supports democracy?
- Martin Gurri. The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2014/2018). How will networks and hierarchies shape the struggle between authorities and the public?
- Jeffrey Winters. Oligarchy (2011). Are democracy and oligarchy incompatible? How do oligarchs maintain their power?
- Jürgen Habermas. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). What is the public sphere and what role does it play in making democracy work?
- John Maynard Keynes. The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). It is common to point out parallels between today and the early 20th century. This is a good place to start digging deeper. NYT 2019.
Law
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd there has been a fierce debate about systemic racism and how it manifests itself in the economy, in education, the military, police, etc. But what even is the system? In a first approximation, I would say the system is the law.
- Katharina Pistor. The Code of Capital (2019). Is there substance in the often repeated claim that the economy is rigged against ordinary people? How does the law favour some forms of capital over others? What is the role of the law in creating capital in the first place?
- Tom Bell. Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Nations. (2018).
- Barry Friedman (2017) Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission What could democratic and constitutional policing look like?
- Tom Bell. Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good. (2014).
- Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. (2010).
- Lawrence Lessig. Code and other laws of cyberspace (1999). A history of the early internet focussing on the relationship between law and code. There is an updated version from 2006.
Philosophy and Ethics
The paradox of market economies (epitomized by the slogan “Greed is Good”) is that markets work best if they serve intrinsic values. But what are intrinsic values and how can we agree on them? Even seemingly technical questions (how to account for externalities, which economic activities to include in the GDP, etc) ultimately are ethical questions. There is a widespread feeling that utilitarian ethics is not sufficient, but what are the alternatives?
- Benjamin Lipscomb. The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. (2021).
- Michael Sandel. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012). Do markets distribute scarce resources efficiently only if inequality is limited? Are there values that get corrupted when they are marketized? (What happens to our public town square if likes on Twitter are traded, if the amplification algorithm maximizes advertising revenue, if “grassroot” movements are paid by special interests?)
- Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theology. (1980).
- Thomas Kuhn (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Can we learn from Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shift to steer our course into the future?
- Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. (322 BC). Could Aristotle’s account of virtue (every virtue balances two vices) be an alternative to the dualism that underpins much of our current world view?
History
History studies how societies change, a topic that was never more important than today.
- William Dalrymple. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (2019). An early chapter in the history of multinational corporations, colonialism and the stock exchange. Was the EIC an aberration or a blueprint? How do corporate and government power feed each other? (Btw, the American Revolution was in part a revolution against the East India Company.)
- Wael Ghonim. Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power: A Memoir (2012). Which role did technology play in the Arab Spring?
- David Graeber. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). What is money?
- Hitler’s rise to power
- James Pool. Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power (1997). What role did German oligarchs play in the rise of Hitler?
- Stefan Zweig. Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers. (1942). Memoirs of a European who grew up in the optimism of the late 19th century and witnessed civilization collapse in two world wars.
- Sebastian Haffner. Geschichte eines Deutschen (1939/2000). Autobiography taking place in 1933.
- Lion Feuchtwanger. Die Geschwister Oppermann. 1934. Novel tracing the events of 1932/33. There is a new English translation.
- Will and Ariel Durant. The Story of Civilization (1935–1975). A monumental cultural history from antiquity to modernity.