Aramis
or the love of technology
by Bruno Latour, Henning Schmidgen · first published 1992
83% recommend17% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Case study of a failed Paris personal mass transit system, praised as both brilliant and beautiful; useful for seeing how technical projects succeed or fail within social and sociotechnical systems.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
A guided-transportation system intended for Paris, Aramis represented a major advance in personal rapid transit: it combined the efficiency of a subway with the flexibility of an automobile. But in the end, its electronic couplings proved too complex and expensive, the political will failed, and the project died in 1987. The story of Aramis is told by several different parties, none of which take precedence over any other: a young engineer and his professor, who act as detective to ferret out the reasons for the project's failure; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and f
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"Aramis, or the Love of Technology" is a fascinating book on the attempted launch of such a system in Paris. https://www.amazon.com/Aramis-Love-Technology-Bruno-Latour/d...
on “Waymo Launches Its Self-Driving Armada” ↗…which includes our social, economic and institutional contexts. Latour's questioning of scientism pre-dates the modern problems of nonreproducibility, p-hacking etc. I would also recommend Latour's work Aramis. The French government attempted an extremely Elon Musk personal transit system in the 80s, and Latour examines why it failed. Perhaps to be read alongside Feynman writing about Challenger in the same…
on “Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science” ↗…bureaucracy The main difference on my end is that I believe "working in a vast decentralized computer bureaucracy" is completely analogous to "working in tech" whether you like it or not. Bruno Latour's book Aramis is a case study in this idea. Brief review of that book here: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~tmisa/reviews/Latour_Aramis.pdf Any technologist who believes they're not working in a vast bureaucracy (both of…
on “Real Time Multiplayer in HTML5” ↗The book on 'Aramis' mentioned is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis,_or_the_Love_of_Technol... ; I picked it up by chance in the room of an anthropology student many years ago and found it fascinating. It's a sociologist's…
on “The road not taken: How we found and lost the dream of Personal Rapid Transit” ↗…technology making or remaking man rather than the other way round is definitely part of Futurism, Modernism and to some extent Bolshevism. I'd suggest reading Bruno Latour on the subject, especially "Aramis, or the Love of Technology".
on “Concorde” ↗I have to recommend "Aramis, or the Love of Technology" by Bruno Latour. It's an account of the development of a failed personal mass transit system that's both brilliant and very beautiful.
on “Bruno Latour Tracks Down Gaia” ↗…Matters" is less a work of theory than a critique that poses core questions about how society should seek to integrate technical advances. Latour's "Science in Action," "Reassembling the Social," and "Aramis" are great examples of his approach to whole-of-system analysis of sociotechnical systems. Rogers' "Diffusion of Innovation" is a classic work theorizing how innovation is communicated through social…
on “Ask HN: Good Books on the History of Technology?” ↗Latour’s “Aramis, or The Love of Technology” is one of my favorite books. It’s the story, at many levels, of a personal transport system and more.
on “A Serious Man: On Bruno Latour” ↗This reminds me a lot of the book by Bruno Latour: "Aramis, or The Love of Technology", which was about a French government-sponsored light rail project called "Aramis" (Really a revolutionary public transport concept), where each car would route itself to it's…
on “Tesla Motors hiring talent for developing self-driving cars” ↗Some other examples include the Bruno Latour classic report on the French "Aramis" system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramis,_or_the_Love_of_Technol... "Guided buses" seem to be in the same category. Edinburgh had some which were replaced by conventional trams at great cost. Cambridge…
on “What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)” ↗