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Until this point in my path through life as a hacker, my potential employers have wanted no more than a summary of my technical feats and accomplishments. AI do a lot of writing of many kinds, code, designs, plans and the coordination of implementations, but there is no history of publication to cite as the currency of a thinking life. And so I must tell my story briefly to show how it is grounded in experience of both practices of making and designing physical things and the arts of craftsmanship and the design, implementation and operations of digital systems.
My path is that of a hacker, I got started because first I could not help taking things apart to learn about how they worked. From a working class background with parents with some education and some success in school, I was near top of my class at one of the best public schools in Chicago. One summer job was in a machine shop from a referal of my machine shop teacher, the next school year Iearned Fortran, then BASIC from a book for my next summer job was programming. Earned myself entrance to MIT and got my BS in EECS in three years out of five; had to take a break to earn some money before getting my degree in '83. Along the way, I had build a kit computer and started with a PC non-compatible company the same month the first IBM PCs were out in 1980, and I was in a small circle with the founders of the free software movement, the time when the GPL was created.
But I was never just a hacker, I also wanted to know how systems worked on all levels. I would need to inquire into everything much more deeply. This is where I find the inspiration for my second career as a systems designer and architect. The title of architect in systems implementation doesn't necessarily reward the most far thinking approaches. The MIT environment was great for contextualizing what I have learned as a hands on programmer and started me on a path towards general systems thinking. Working to pay my way through MIT, I came to see that I had a big advantage over most of my classmates by already having practical experience with systems.
My hacker instincts drove my curiosity, and I spent my summer earning to buy my own computer from kits into a system. During my working break from MIT, I worked for a PC manufacturer at the time the industry was just starting and later with Zenith as well. Although my degree concentration was the CS side of EECS, along the way I designed a chip in a graduate VLSI design course.
System, Signs and Autopoiesis
After Fernando Flores' "Ontological Design Course" introduced me to system biology in Maturana and Varella, and later I came to understand the critical importance of C.S. Peirce and his theory of signs. I intuitively grasped the potential for a triadic theory of signs to revolutionize how we think about systems and emergence. Recently discovering Merrill's "Signs Grow", he demostrates how it can be done in a sweeping way that I think Peirce himself would admire. I didn't know the deeper connections of these emerging bodies of work in language and cognitive science, but I was immersed in this thinking. It was clear that the history of AI was filled with a lot of hype and that cognifive science had a lot more work to do to make significant progress. The neural network ideas were common, but we didn't have the processing power or massive data sources to train them to specific tasks.
There is a lot of hype in the current wave of AI talk, but it is also clear that the work and context has advanced to the point that irresponsible applications could pose significant risks very soon, and we probably wouldn't know it publicly for some time if it did. There are similar risks in a number of fields, e.g. genetic engineering, and all of these would only be amplified with the advent of strong AI. I may not be specialist enough to write papers that advance some specialized field, that isn't the best role of an experienced engineer and designer. I will remain ever an amatuer in any of the traditions that I have dabbled in to fill out a background towards a larger scope of work. My practical experience in systems as well as my life's path through organizations large and small where we cannot help but gain not only technical experience but also with the disfunction of our social architectures that limit the applicability of general design principles in practice.
Benkler'sAn illuminationOffer to Serve the Critical Missions of Humanity
Given this history I find myself at a difficult crossroads with so much to offer to therolebenefit of many and no adaquate access to the Commonseconomic means to do it. Sure, I'm employable, but as with too many of my contemporaries, that way is neither sufficient for the family nor does it leave me free to produce the most possible value for the most of us. Like many others like me, most of whom don't have many advantages that I have had, this is know way to live. It can be hard to even keep your head up enough to keep at it because it is drilled into us that our failure is our fault and our fault alone.
I don't accept this because my education and experience tell me that we, as an emergent global culture, face a number of immediate crises that will take all the collective will we can muster. The crisies are not created by the suffering people but by the systems as they have evolved. They may have evolved to function reasonably in a historical context, but in this moment theemergencesystem itself is deeply implicated in the disfunction. The story told about it may have once been true enough, but now has become a cover for injustice and blaming the victim.
With my background, I can and will serve one or more missions to the future, but I can't do it alone. None ofnewus modescan, we need all of production.us. Most likely a future me will look back at a path with many surprises. My education and experience tell me that collective success will depend much more on learning to form and act from the context of much more powerful collectives. Not just AI as in artificial, but more towards augmented intelligence. And reaching beyond just intelligence and attempting to understand and create collective wisdom and consciousness. As scientists and engineers begin to work with collective intelligence they are naturally asking the next questions about these next steps.
I confess that I don't have many answers, but I'm well qualified to ask good questions about how to survive the singularity. Survival cannot be a limited mission, division is failure. Can collective missions to save the living planet really work? What kind of collective vision is necessary for collective hope? To fight collective dispair? I do have hope, even confidence, that humanity has the collective power to choose our path, to choose living systems over dying and killing systems.
My path is that of a hacker, I got started because first I could not help taking things apart to learn about how they worked. From a working class background with parents with some education and some success in school, I was near top of my class at one of the best public schools in Chicago. One summer job was in a machine shop from a referal of my machine shop teacher, the next school year Iearned Fortran, then BASIC from a book for my next summer job was programming. Earned myself entrance to MIT and got my BS in EECS in three years out of five; had to take a break to earn some money before getting my degree in '83. Along the way, I had build a kit computer and started with a PC non-compatible company the same month the first IBM PCs were out in 1980, and I was in a small circle with the founders of the free software movement, the time when the GPL was created.
But I was never just a hacker, I also wanted to know how systems worked on all levels. I would need to inquire into everything much more deeply. This is where I find the inspiration for my second career as a systems designer and architect. The title of architect in systems implementation doesn't necessarily reward the most far thinking approaches. The MIT environment was great for contextualizing what I have learned as a hands on programmer and started me on a path towards general systems thinking. Working to pay my way through MIT, I came to see that I had a big advantage over most of my classmates by already having practical experience with systems.
My hacker instincts drove my curiosity, and I spent my summer earning to buy my own computer from kits into a system. During my working break from MIT, I worked for a PC manufacturer at the time the industry was just starting and later with Zenith as well. Although my degree concentration was the CS side of EECS, along the way I designed a chip in a graduate VLSI design course.
System, Signs and Autopoiesis
After Fernando Flores' "Ontological Design Course" introduced me to system biology in Maturana and Varella, and later I came to understand the critical importance of C.S. Peirce and his theory of signs. I intuitively grasped the potential for a triadic theory of signs to revolutionize how we think about systems and emergence. Recently discovering Merrill's "Signs Grow", he demostrates how it can be done in a sweeping way that I think Peirce himself would admire. I didn't know the deeper connections of these emerging bodies of work in language and cognitive science, but I was immersed in this thinking. It was clear that the history of AI was filled with a lot of hype and that cognifive science had a lot more work to do to make significant progress. The neural network ideas were common, but we didn't have the processing power or massive data sources to train them to specific tasks.
There is a lot of hype in the current wave of AI talk, but it is also clear that the work and context has advanced to the point that irresponsible applications could pose significant risks very soon, and we probably wouldn't know it publicly for some time if it did. There are similar risks in a number of fields, e.g. genetic engineering, and all of these would only be amplified with the advent of strong AI. I may not be specialist enough to write papers that advance some specialized field, that isn't the best role of an experienced engineer and designer. I will remain ever an amatuer in any of the traditions that I have dabbled in to fill out a background towards a larger scope of work. My practical experience in systems as well as my life's path through organizations large and small where we cannot help but gain not only technical experience but also with the disfunction of our social architectures that limit the applicability of general design principles in practice.
Given this history I find myself at a difficult crossroads with so much to offer to the
I don't accept this because my education and experience tell me that we, as an emergent global culture, face a number of immediate crises that will take all the collective will we can muster. The crisies are not created by the suffering people but by the systems as they have evolved. They may have evolved to function reasonably in a historical context, but in this moment the
With my background, I can and will serve one or more missions to the future, but I can't do it alone. None of
I confess that I don't have many answers, but I'm well qualified to ask good questions about how to survive the singularity. Survival cannot be a limited mission, division is failure. Can collective missions to save the living planet really work? What kind of collective vision is necessary for collective hope? To fight collective dispair? I do have hope, even confidence, that humanity has the collective power to choose our path, to choose living systems over dying and killing systems.