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Up 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. Although I have written about code, designs, plans and the coordination of implementations, there is no history of publication to cite as the currency of a thinking life. Therefore, I feelwill inclined to tell my story about how my career has been 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. Originally I started on this path because I would take things apart to learn about how they worked. I come from a working class background with parents with some education and some success in school. I was near the top of my class at one of the best high schools in Chicago. Because of a referral from my machine shop teacher, I landed a one summer job in a machine shop. The next school year I Iearned Fortran, then BASIC from a book. My next summer job was programming. I received a scholarship from MIT, and got my BS in EECS in three years out of five. I had to take a break to earn some money before getting my degree in '83. Along the way, I built a kit computer and started with a PC non-compatible company the same month the first IBM PCs were out in1980.1981. I was in a small circle with the founders of the free software movement,movement at the time when the GPL was created.
I was never just a hacker; I also wanted to know how systems worked on all levels. I felt a 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 had already learned as a hands on programmer, and started me on a path towards general systems thinking. While working to pay my way through MIT, I came to see that I had a big advantage over most of my classmates since I already had practical experience with systems.
Although my degree concentration was on the CS side of EECS, along the way I designed a chip in a graduate VLSI design course. As a consultant at AT&T labs, I made UNIX run on a new chip design, and later at Zenith as well, I used my hacker interests to bridge my software roles into hardware, systems and network architectures.
System, Signs and Autopoiesis
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 I discovered Merrill's "Signs Grow" where he demostrates how it can be done in a sweeping way that I think Peirce himself would appreciate. 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.
Analogy from systems of all kinds as well as the over-hyped progress in AI suggests that evolution and the emergence of new systems levels as creative acts of evolution are common to and at the core of all systems change. Peircean semiotics and sign systems are an important and overlooked tool to unite our thinking about systems of all kinds. There is still a lot of hype in the current wave of AI talk. 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 knowledgeable enough to write papers that advance some specialized field, and that isn't the best role of an experienced engineer and designer.
I will remain 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, has taught me that we cannot help but gain not only technical experience but also how to root out the dysfunction that limits the applicability of general design principles in practice. I offer this history and background as a point of embarkation on the rest of my lifes work yet to come. Like this personal history, I have works in progress and some bits of completed thought to share. I hope this shows what I can write for the future, and what I might bring to important design conversations that must be collectively convened for the sake of all of us. I bring many more questions than answers, but I am confident about what I have to contribute to necessary collective works.
An Offer To Serve the Critical Missions of Humanity
Given this history I find myself at a difficult crossroads with so much to offer to the benefit of many, and no adaquate access to the economic 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 many of us. Like many others like me, most of whom don't have many advantages that I have had, this is no 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 knowledge and experience that 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 at this moment the system itself is deeply implicated in the dysfunction. 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 in the future, but I can't do it alone. None of us can. We need all of 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. We need to reach beyond just intelligence and attempt 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, and division is failure. Can collective missions to save the living planet really work? What kind of collective vision is necessary for collective hope and to fight collective dispair? I do have hope, even confidence, that humanity has the collective power to choose our path, and therefore to choose living systems over dying and killing systems.
My path is that of a hacker. Originally I started on this path because I would take things apart to learn about how they worked. I come from a working class background with parents with some education and some success in school. I was near the top of my class at one of the best high schools in Chicago. Because of a referral from my machine shop teacher, I landed a one summer job in a machine shop. The next school year I Iearned Fortran, then BASIC from a book. My next summer job was programming. I received a scholarship from MIT, and got my BS in EECS in three years out of five. I had to take a break to earn some money before getting my degree in '83. Along the way, I built a kit computer and started with a PC non-compatible company the same month the first IBM PCs were out in
I was never just a hacker; I also wanted to know how systems worked on all levels. I felt a 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 had already learned as a hands on programmer, and started me on a path towards general systems thinking. While working to pay my way through MIT, I came to see that I had a big advantage over most of my classmates since I already had practical experience with systems.
Although my degree concentration was on the CS side of EECS, along the way I designed a chip in a graduate VLSI design course. As a consultant at AT&T labs, I made UNIX run on a new chip design, and later at Zenith as well, I used my hacker interests to bridge my software roles into hardware, systems and network architectures.
System, Signs and Autopoiesis
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 I discovered Merrill's "Signs Grow" where he demostrates how it can be done in a sweeping way that I think Peirce himself would appreciate. 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.
Analogy from systems of all kinds as well as the over-hyped progress in AI suggests that evolution and the emergence of new systems levels as creative acts of evolution are common to and at the core of all systems change. Peircean semiotics and sign systems are an important and overlooked tool to unite our thinking about systems of all kinds. There is still a lot of hype in the current wave of AI talk. 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 knowledgeable enough to write papers that advance some specialized field, and that isn't the best role of an experienced engineer and designer.
I will remain 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, has taught me that we cannot help but gain not only technical experience but also how to root out the dysfunction that limits the applicability of general design principles in practice. I offer this history and background as a point of embarkation on the rest of my lifes work yet to come. Like this personal history, I have works in progress and some bits of completed thought to share. I hope this shows what I can write for the future, and what I might bring to important design conversations that must be collectively convened for the sake of all of us. I bring many more questions than answers, but I am confident about what I have to contribute to necessary collective works.
An Offer To Serve the Critical Missions of Humanity
Given this history I find myself at a difficult crossroads with so much to offer to the benefit of many, and no adaquate access to the economic 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 many of us. Like many others like me, most of whom don't have many advantages that I have had, this is no 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 knowledge and experience that 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 at this moment the system itself is deeply implicated in the dysfunction. 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 in the future, but I can't do it alone. None of us can. We need all of 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. We need to reach beyond just intelligence and attempt 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, and division is failure. Can collective missions to save the living planet really work? What kind of collective vision is necessary for collective hope and to fight collective dispair? I do have hope, even confidence, that humanity has the collective power to choose our path, and therefore to choose living systems over dying and killing systems.