When a manufacturer offers a 10,000-mile warranty on a car or slaps a “bear-resistant” label on a camping cooler, what do we know about how trustworthy that promise is, and how it’s backed up? For the cooler, it’s Kobuk the Destroyer, the fiercest member of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee’s panel of product-testing bears: Gifted at cracking locks and foiling manufacturers, Kobuk and his fellow bears play a crucial role in keeping us (and our snacks) safe. For everything else—as journalist Alex Davies reveals in this freewheeling tour of the hidden work that keeps the modern world going, safely and dependably—we have test engineers, who imagine how anything and everything could go wrong, and fight back.

From echo-proof chambers to Formula 1 wind tunnels to airplane hangars turned torture labs, Davies takes readers behind the scenes of a workforce that combats contingency with equal parts analytical rigor and wild imagination. Armed with sixty-foot cannons that fire frozen chickens into jet engines, rocket sleds so fast they knock fillings out of teeth, and Lazy Susans for tasting hundreds of cups of tea a day, test engineers break it so you can buy it.

But failure is a stubborn opponent: The tsunami will overtop the dam, the chatbot will give bad advice, the bear will eat your sandwich. Test engineers don’t just prevent disaster; they limit its fallout and make peace with its reality by balancing risk against reward. In an age of climate crisis, run-amok tech, and eroding trust in public institutions, knowing how they do it—and how we might do the same—is more valuable than ever before.

Brimming with humor and insight, Kobuk the Destroyer is a celebration of human ingenuity and a deeply human story about uncertainty, resilience, and the art of making a fragile world a little more reliable.

Alex Davies recently took time to answer seven questions from Porchlight about his new book. 

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Porchlight Book Company: Writing a book is no small undertaking. What compelled you to write this one?

Alex Davies: 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. Which was a bummer, because beyond the joy of the individual tests, I was fascinated by the history and theory of this work. Writing a book was my avenue to looking at the field as a whole, rather than in standalone vignettes. 

PBC: What is one unanswered question you encountered as you wrote the book that you are most interested in answering now?

AD: Is artificial intelligence truly testable? In the book I write about “red teaming,” in which humans try to make chatbots break their rules. But AI is advancing at an incredible pace, and we’ll need more sophisticated thinking and tools to rein it in. So I’m now interested in seeing how the field of testing evolves to catch up and whether, for the first time, we’ve created a technology we can’t control.  

PBC: If there is only one thing a reader takes away from reading this book, what would you hope it to be?

AD: The work that goes into making any given product safe and reliable—the work that lets us have things like warranties and age ratings on toys—is human. It’s people who negotiate with each other to set standards. It’s people who use their imaginations to think of everything that can happen in the real world, and people who use their creativity to recreate those conditions in a laboratory. It’s people who take shortcuts, people who apply rigor. Understanding that is the key step to demystifying and understanding a world that’s typically hidden from us but that has a dramatic impact on how we live. 

PBC: One of the great things about books is that they tend to lead readers to other books. What book[s] related to this topic would you recommend people read after (or perhaps even before) reading your book?

AD: Anything by Henry Petroski, an engineer with who was terrific at making his field feel interesting and important to non-engineers. To Engineer Is Human and The Pencil are personal favorites.

PBC: What is your favorite book?

AD: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. A book I love so much that whenever I think about it, or see it on my shelf, I open to a random page and end up spending at least 20 minutes reading. 

PBC: What are you reading now?

AD: The Disappearers by Marlon James. And the whole while, I kick myself for not taking James’ creative writing class at Macalester College, where he was teaching (and still teaches) when I attended. 

PBC: Do you have any future projects in the works that we can look forward to?

AD: Nothing concrete at the moment—I’m devoting most of my mental energy to my new baby—but I’m confident I’ll have another book looking to get out of my brain before too long. 

About the Author

Alex Davies is a technology writer, 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.