A technically qualified specialist in reliability or security can appreciate the notion of risk as a tool to address the negative effects of technology use. Recently, this topic has become quite popular among various authors dealing with computing or networking issues [1,2]. There are also many books that deal in general with risk engineering [3,4]. This book has a different perspective: Anderson and Felici present the problem at a very high level and thoroughly discuss in a qualitative way the various aspects of risk that can arise due to technological developments.

The work is quite short--six chapters--and is not a text that can be directly transferred into a set of procedures. The authors present aspects of technology-society interaction in the context of risk. The book addresses such topics as the basics of risk (especially knowledge production and usage), system susceptibility to risks, how changes in organizational structure influence risk, and risks due to social behavior. It concludes with an attempt to define a society’s general technological risk. The annotated bibliography includes a list of 144 recommended and useful works (mainly conference and journal papers), with short sketches of their contents.

While this book does not include formulas or algorithms, it might be somewhat useful to engineers who design services or human interfaces.