Skip to main content

Alex Davies - Five way interview

Alex Davies is a technology journalist, author of Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car, and a former editor at Wired, The Athletic, and Business Insider. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley. His latest book is How to Keep a Plane in the Sky.

Why engineering?

I'm not an engineer myself — I'm a journalist who's spent years covering people who are. What draws me to it is that engineering is where abstract values like 'safety' and 'trust' actually get made concrete. Someone has to decide, in specific numbers, how much force a car seat can take before it's a failure, or how many g's a human body can survive. Those decisions are usually invisible to the rest of us, but they're some of the most consequential ones our society makes. 

I got hooked on writing about it because it's a way to write about risk, trust, and human judgment while staying grounded in real, physical stakes — a wing that either holds or doesn't, a test that either predicts reality or doesn't. 

Why this book?

Over years as a technology reporter, I had the chance to write about how lots of different products were tested and developed. But in any given story, I didn’t have the space or freedom to write about testing as a broader concept. How it has changed over time, its unavoidable tensions, the people who make it work. 

This book was an opportunity to do that — to combine the fun of the individual tests and stories with the connective tissue that shows the reader how this work actually underpins so much of modern life.   

Do you think as driverless cars become more common they will present a particular test engineering issue?

A key hurdle for testing driverless cars is that it’s just really hard to know what’s going to stump the computer. Driving is a social and dynamic activity; unexpected closures or police or emergency activity or anything else calls for coordinating with other drivers and bits of improvisation. That’s really easy for humans, but typically difficult for robots and computers. Designing for and testing for those scenarios remains a real hurdle. 

What’s next?

For me as an author, nothing on the immediate horizon. I’m currently focusing my mental energy and free time on raising/keeping up with my daughter, who’s about to turn one. 

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I’m keenly interested by how quickly the conversation around AI is evolving, especially with regard to whether and how it should be reined in. I think testing will play a key role here, because simply stopping or slowing development won’t help much given how capable this technology already is. I’m fascinated to see how these companies, governments, and third party players combine (or don’t) to tackle it. 

Image © Christie Hemm

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Keep a Plane in the Sky - Alex Davies ****

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...
Post a Comment
Read more

On the Equality of All Things - Carlo Rovelli ****

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...
Post a Comment
Read more