Dr David Bell

Dr David Bell is an author and software engineer based in New South Wales, Australia, and a retired specialist anaesthetist. He practised as a consultant anaesthetist (in American usage, an anesthesiologist) in Sydney from 2018 to 2023, across cardiac, thoracic, neurosurgical, trauma and obstetric lists, and holds a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery and a Bachelor of Engineering (Software) with First Class Honours, both from the University of Sydney.

He trained as a software engineer before he trained as a doctor, and first worked on machine learning in 2004, when a feature vector was something you built by hand. Two careers spent around systems that must not fail, the anaesthetic machine and the production server, left him with a particular interest in what happens at the boundary between a person and a machine that is supposed to be doing what it was told.

Lady Lovelace’s Objection is his first book: a narrative history of computing told through the people who built it, many of whom were written out of the story afterwards. It is being serialised on Substack as it is finished. He also writes on medicine, software and artificial intelligence at drdavidbell.com.au, and hosts the companion podcast, Lady Lovelace’s Notebook.