2020: A Year of Science, Tech and Innovation Reading

2020 was an odd year for reading. Prior to the pandemic, I would read about a book a week – including fiction and non-fiction. When COVID-related anxiety and restrictions intensified in March, my focus and attention vanished and I could get through no more than a couple of pages a day. Good thing I read Moby Dick in 2019, otherwise Ahab would still be on the seas searching for the big fish.

By summer, I rediscovered my ability to read and enjoyed some great books. Among those were some volumes in the science, technology, innovation and ethics fields. Here are my favourites.

Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology had been sitting on my shelves for months before I finally managed to get to it – and it was worth the wait. Standing out from the rising cacophony of books on algorithmic and technology bias, Benjamin provides a grounded, insightful and personal investigation of the way technologies reflect and reinforce inequality and, specifically, anti-Black racism. I’d recommend reading it along with Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality and Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Destruction – and with a viewing of Shalini Kantayya’s documentary Coded Bias.

Ron Deibert’s Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society was another favourite in 2020. The companion book to his Massey Lectures, Deibert uses Reset to illuminate and warn us about the surveillance capitalist and authoritarian logics that inform and infuse the technologies we carry in our back pockets and install in our homes, workplaces and public spaces. Drawing on the work of his Citizen Lab at the Munk School, and other recent work on technologies’ design and implications, he makes ideas about surveillance capitalism more accessible and – by sharing some unsettling experiences of his Citizen Lab colleagues and others – more worrying than has perhaps been the case for many. If you want to read more in this vein, the obvious choice is Soshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, but I’d make a strong case for James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State as foundation for further thinking.

Jack Stigloe released a very short (70 page) book this year, Who’s Driving Innovation: New Technologies and the Collaborative State, that offers a crisp introduction to some of the broad ethical issues associated with new and emerging technologies. What I really like about Stigloe’s book is the attempt to work at the intersection of normative ethics and political economy – that is, he wrestles both with what we ought to do and what we can (and can’t) do about technological risk given institutional, political and cultural constraints and possibilities. It informed the design of my Ethics of Innovation course at the Munk School this winter. 

Shifting to technology with fleshier implications, Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing by Dalhousie University bioethicist Francoise Baylis was an engaging read. While Baylis’ own views about genome editing are clearly evident throughout the book, she introduces many of the ethical questions and controversies in ways that invite, rather than close, discussion. What’s more, Baylis offers a thoughtful examination, and a modified extension, of Roger A. Pielke Jr.’s thinking in The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics about how scientists and ethicists should see their role in science and technology policy. This is helpful both for those who work on issues related to human genome editing, and academics and advisors in a range of science, technology and innovation fields more broadly.

While this is supposed to be a list of best science and tech books, I have to add one paper to the list: Madeleine Clare Elish’s “Moral Crumple Zones: Cautionary Tales in Human Robot Interaction.” It’s a paper I’ve read a few times and revisited yet again this year. Elish’s paper is great, not only for the evocative term “moral crumple zone” – which signifies who or what bears moral liability (justly or not) for the harm technologies can cause – but also because it pushes us to think clearly about agency in technology design, deployment, regulation and use. It pairs nicely with Stigloe’s Who’s Driving Innovation and a recent book from MIT roboticist Julie Shah and Laura Major: What To Expect When You’re Expecting Robots: The Future of Human-Robot Collaboration. 

There’s one other book I read in 2020, but I’m not allowed to talk about it. 

On an unrelated note, watch for my colleague Dan Breznitz’s new book in 2021, Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World.

See you in 2021.