These are notes I made while reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows. It is a book on Systems Design, or perhaps better, understanding systems. These systems can be software, drinking water systems, political systems, or the world climate “system”

On resilience

Resilience is not the same thing as being static or constant over time. Resilient systems can be very dynamic. Short-term oscillations, or periodic outbreaks, or long cycles of succession, climax, and collapse may in fact be the normal condition, which resilience acts to restore!

System traps

Sometimes systems fail to work, Meadows refers to these as ‘traps’ and identifies a list of common traps, and how to escape from these. It is good to reference the book in case you encounter such traps.

One of the trap mentioned is success to the successful, which may kill compe…

In “We Just Build Hammers”, Coraline Ada Ehmke explores historic parallels to moral issues in technology & software development. Referencing both fiction, historic and scientific sources, the book moves in four parts towards the current day and age.

I start of with a summary of the book, followed by a short reflection.

Summary

In the first part H.G. Wells’ writings set the scene. Wells’ has an almost scientific approach to his writing. Ehmke writes:

Wells’s future histories shined a light on what was possible and gave people permission to imagine alternate futures. But he insisted on the need for rational approaches for bringing these futures about or averting their catastrophe.”

His literature is compared to events that were developing in that same era. Leo Szilard is quoted saying:

In so far as the present discoveries in physics are concerned, the forecast of the writers may prove to be more a…