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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 will 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 and then about micro computer kits. My next summer job was programming in BASIC after learning it from a library book. 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 1981. I was in a small circle with the founders of the free software movement at the time when the GPL was created.
ILooking back, I was never just a hacker; I also wanted to know how systems worked on all levels.levels. Even earlier, I had a dream of being an architect. My mother was an artist and I grew up near the studio home of Frank Lloyd Wright's studio and the many homes he had designed. I felt a need to inquire into everything much more deeply. This is where I finddidn't thewant inspirationto forjust myhack, secondI careerwanted asto be 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.
Systems, SignsThe andmore Autopoiesisdifferent
In retrospect,kinds I has almost no role models who had lives of thinking,design writing and teachingarchitecture inthat myI workinglearned classabout, education.the Evenmore at MIT, I sawcould myselfsee asthe learningparallels myand tradecommons asstructures. aAll programmerdesign andis engineer.ultimately Mygrounded scholarshipsin didhuman notneeds, cover my education and Iarchitects wasnot aonly workinghave engineerto beforestudy Ipeople graduated.and Beforetheir Isocial foundarchitectures outjust Ias wasmuch prettyas goodwe atdo mathengineering and programming,science. I hadneeded ato dreamlearn ofmore beingabout anphilosophy architect. My mother was an artist and language. I grewknew upfrom nearcognitive thescience studiothat homewe ofmust Frankalso Lloydground Wright'sthis studiowork andin thenew manysystems homesthinking hein hadbiology designed.that Whenunderstands Ithe becameorganism as a softwarenetwork engineer.of relationships.
FernandoSystems, Flores'Signs "Ontological Design Course" introduced me to system biology in Maturana and Varella,Autopoiesis
Itandwasn't lateruntil I cameconnected to understand the criticalwork importance of C.S. Peirce in Semiotics and his theory of signs.categories Iand intuitivelysigns. graspedIn Fernando theFlores' potential"Ontological forDesign aCourse" triadicI theorywas ofintroduced signs to revolutionizesystem howbiology wein thinkMaturana aboutand systemsVarella, and emergence. Recently I discoveredrealized Merrill'sonly "Signslater Grow" where he demostrates how itPercean cansigns bewere done in a sweepingcritical waypart thatof Itheir thinktheory Peirceof himselfautopoeisis. would appreciate. I didn'thave knowbegun theto deeperexplore connectionssome of these emergingideas bodies of work in languagewriting, and cognitive science, but I wasam immersedno inacademic this thinking. It was clear that the history of AI was filled with a lot of hype, and thatfinding cognifivemy scienceaudience hadis a lotbit moretrickier. workI tocite dothis tostory makeas significantbackground progress.towards Thecollaborative neuralinnovation networkin ideasdesign wereand common,architecture butin weservice didn'tof havehumanity. 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 recent 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 able enough to write papers that advance somea highly specialized field, andbut that isn't the best role of an experienced engineer and designer.
I willwould remainclaim anthis amatueris inexactly anythe kind of thebroad traditionsknowledge that Iis haveneeded dabbledso incritically to fillsort out athe backgroundhype towardsand arealities largerof scopecurrent ofrisks work.as well as opportunities.
My practical experience in systems, as well as my life's path through organizations large and small, hastaughtshown me that much of the dysfunction we cannothave helpproduced butin gainour world must be rooted out if we are to not only technicalsurvive, experiencebut thrive as human beings. It isn't human nature that constrains us, but alsoour howsocial systems as they have developed historically. We are not condemned to rootrepeat outour past mistakes if we can learn from them what we need to create new social systems. We must temper the dysfunctionenlightenment urge to overturn all of the traditions; progress can only be made within traditions. But we must not at the same time lose the insights that limitsflowed when the applicabilitygrip of generaltradition designisn't principlesmixed with power and authority not grounded in practice.the traditions of knowledge themselves.
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 and then about micro computer kits. My next summer job was programming in BASIC after learning it from a library book. 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 1981. I was in a small circle with the founders of the free software movement at the time when the GPL was created.
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.
Systems,
In
It
Analogy from systems of all kinds as well as the over-hyped recent 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.
My practical experience in systems, as well as my life's path through organizations large and small, has
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.