Lee Felsenstein: The current state of AI is summed up in my book by the section heading: Artificial Stupidity. It reminds me of David G. from high school, who never thought that he could deduce a correct answer and was notorious for polling others around him for their answers so he could construct an answer that might possibly get a passing grade. That strategy would rate zero on my ‘intelligence’ scale and somewhat higher on my ‘cunning’ scale. 

When I read postings on Facebook that go on and on at great, repetitive length describing something or someone without putting forth a single idea, I realize that I have been tricked into reading an essay generated by AI (usually ChatGPT). I feel slightly taken advantage of when the realization hits me. 

Intelligence – in my view – has a creative component. It makes an unanticipated connection, or tickles the funnybone, or presents a striking juxtaposition that is more than random and vanishing – it has to build upon these types of incidents to let you out on a higher floor than the one on which you entered. 

People are indeed using GPT and other apps to provide editorial criticism for not only programs but for written text. I was advised to run my book manuscript through ChatGPT to give myself input for stylistic editing. I wasn’t having it; I won’t allow an idiot-savant of a machine to lead me by the nose through a task that I should do myself, or should present to other people for discussion.

That being said, there is a universe of tasks that require no intelligence and occupy the lives and attention of multitudes. Theodore Sturgeon’s famous law (“90 percent of everything is crap”) applies to that universe, which accounts for nontrivial percentages of GDP, and which is threatened by the onset of AI. When the mass of people who crank out bullshit to keep their bosses placated are rendered redundant by AI, there had better be tasks ready for them that give their lives a little more meaning and provide a salary. Otherwise we will face a fearsome revolt that will make the MAGA movement look like a tea party (or has that one already been done?)

LF: Computers are great at counting beans – always have been – and blockchain just makes this impermeable to legal authority. So what? The black box isn’t going to get arrested – the people outside it who profit from the illegality are. Police work has always concentrated on the people involved – they make stupid mistakes that incriminate themselves, and are prone to greed and thinking they’re smarter than they really are. I don’t want to automate the process by having a wonderful machine crank out well-formatted reports on who violated what law when. Law enforcement requires a certain amount of – guess what – intelligence.

LF: What I would want them to learn is that the barriers to creativity and social impact are nowhere as high as they are felt to be. Digital technology (meaning the software) can be fashioned by very small groups and distribution of its use is primarily a social matter – it doesn’t require large amounts of money. It does require the ability to assemble groups of interested people and start them off puttering around to see what can be done and how to intercommunicate among groups.

This is my message: I have to proclaim the Golden Age of Engineering, in which the capital requirements have fallen so low and the body of knowledge has grown so accessible that significant products and projects can be realized by creators and enthusiasts. And as I say – “to change the rules, change the tools”.

Geeks like me have to develop our ability to talk outside of technical boundaries – a very good way to do that is to envision a game whose play can be facilitated by your app, and try to seed the tool/game combination among your contemporaries. 

LF: In my first draft, I found myself elaborating on my childhood and what made me who I am, but I tore that up when I realized that was off the point I was trying to make – namely, how I developed the ideas that led me to social media and the personal computer. As I went forward (and my writing process was just what I knew how to do – dump words out on the page and then look at them, the way I had done my journalistic writing on deadline), I began to see a larger outline – one man questing after his holy grail of finding (more accurately making possible through technical development) an accepting, nurturing and supportive community of the sort I had never known in my family or outside. I had experienced a vision of such a possible community in 1965 immediately following the Free Speech Movement’s victory, and that kept me going.

The writing did give me a vantage point over my history, and allowed me to research some points on which I was unclear. I found that there were a few others who were following parallel paths with visions somewhat similar to mine, but I seemed to be the only one who was sufficiently obsessive-compulsive and possessed of high enough skills to stick with it for the long term, and throw off enough artifacts of value to support me in the process.

Thus I came to realize that I was probably the key (I say the ‘go-to’) person in tying together the student radical political culture, the larger Dionysian counterculture, and the personal computer open-source culture. 

When Efrem Lipkin, Ken Colstad, and I sat down to create The Community Memory Project as a legal entity (a 501 (c)(4) nonprofit), I explicitly took on – with their concurrence – the role of public scapegoat for believers in the great man theory of history. 

Later on, Lipkin came to blame me for hogging the glory (Ken died in 1985) and I have never apologized for taking that position, though I tried to apologize to Efrem personally (he did not accept it). (RU Note: As coauthor with Efrem’s life partner Jude Milhon, I was vaguely familiar with these conflicts.) 

I don’t think I have hurt anyone in the process, but in anticipating the fallout to come from the notoriety stirred up by the book, I have to expect a certain amount of “who does he think he is?” resentment as well as possible lionization by some people who see me as a target of parasitism in the hopes of catching some reflected glory. I can only blunder ahead in the face of this, relying on what I have learned through therapy about self-examination and reflection.

In the summer of 1965 I found myself standing in the street in Emeryville as a troop train approached. I was holding a red flag and two cops were watching me from a parked police car. As the train neared I gulped, stepped onto the tracks and made a mess of trying to flag the train down (I knew it had to describe a figure-8 but nonetheless swung it in a circle, which wrapped the flag around the stick), when a miracle happened! Someone who had been hiding a block up the line dashed out with a huge red flag and started flagging the train. The cops roared off in pursuit of him and I was kept out of jail (the train had a supervisor in the cab who instructed the crew to ignore flaggers like me).

Maybe someone will save me from myself in this case, too. Not likely, though – I’ll have to do it myself.

LF: I have never felt that I was any kind of hip guy – that reeks of popularity, from which I recoiled as an adolescent. I did encounter, in my discussions with the Homebrew Computer Club participants, a general consensus that what we were about would be subversive to the general order of society (the most stultifying and immobilizing aspects of the order, that is). 

They wouldn’t discuss it much, but I recognized the thread from science-fiction that better worlds are possible through technology, especially when the technology is wielded by groups – sort of the syndicalist world view. Our after-meeting gatherings at The Oasis (burgers and steam beer) were closest to this vision, and we all loved them. Is this countercultural? Certainly they were counter-authoritarian!

LF: No – counterculture is where my motivation came from – I saw people at the point of liberation, being creative – taking risks they had never anticipated, defying their conditioning. I’m not laying cunning marketing plans by making it prominent – I have no idea what it means to the current generation (though I do mean it to be incongruous to my generation, and maybe Gen Z).

LF: In a few episodes I show that not fitting into the general consensus worldview has provided protection for me and my ideas. County prosecutors ignored me in favor of more political targets, no private or governmental Lucifer showed up to co-opt me and my work, IBM did not bring down their assumed hammer when the Homebrewers started to show them up.

Security through obscurity has apparently worked for me, and Roszak’s critique I find gratifying, as I discovered that he had come around to my outlook in his later coda. I did have the opportunity to confront him (and Jerry Mander) on a panel at a Computers, Privacy, and Freedom conference in the 1990s, and welcomed them from the floor as fellow members of priesthoods, noting Roszak’s “zany” comment. I got no response.

Mander, of course, was known for this blatantly-titled book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which I had read. I don’t plan to be quite so blatant during my fifteen minutes of fame, but it’s always an option (until time’s up).

LF: I’d like to clean up the language here a bit – the issue is not ‘access to data’ (note that the Latin meaning of “data” is “that which is given”) but rather ‘access to each other through data’. The concept that ‘data’ exists in a big pile somewhere and we have to scrabble to ‘get access’ to it is a capitalist mind-game. Back in 1993 there were two schools of thought about the Internet: “We own the content so we’re in charge” (asserted by the movie studios and content owners), and “It’s pipes with meters, stupid”, asserted by the geek crowd. I was invited to participate “as a shit disturber” in Jeff Sonnenfeld’s annual forum of media C-suite suits, where I tried to tell them that people can and will create their own content. This prompted blank stares and no questions, but I did get asked back.

I have hopes for punk sensibility to be able to bring some (dare I say) rationality to the questions of “what is to be done and how?” A community that sees itself as already separate from the capitalist scene, who would never tolerate the archetypal ‘tech bro’ arrogance – that’s who I see as carrying forward the growth of the systems we need to return to the commons and the kind of neo-village society: that is, I believe, the goal of many people. Big is shitty when it’s centralized and run by money – it’s benign when it’s a headcount but those heads see it as “a large number of small”.

LF: My solution is to populate the system with people who perform a reference function: you can ask them for suggestions about where to look for info and for their judgment about it. They would be well positioned to recognize patterns and to develop blacklists and graylists of users who source fake or deceptive data.

People performing this function were suggested in a 1971 paper by Chris Beatty, titled The Journal of the Bay Tea Company. He and his group had tried to set up a computer-based classified ad system in Los Angeles and were run out of business by the L.A. Times, making use of legal restrictions that applied to everyone except newspapers (e.g. selling cars without a dealer’s license).

In The Journal of the Bay Tea Company, Beatty suggested ‘gatekeepers’ who provided a kind of human reference function. Efrem Lipkin passed this paper around among Community Memory members when we started, so we were all familiar with it, though I could not locate a copy now if my life depended on it.

I’ve kept the idea alive and will attempt to implement it in Version 4 of Community Memory, whose design I will be resuming right after the book stabilizes. I have added to it the concept of what I originally called ‘The Inspectorate’, which I was informed by Dr. Poerksen in his book Digital Fever was really just journalism!

I’ll have to design these functions into not only the technical operation of the system but also into its economy. Users would be able to subscribe to one or more gatekeeper to gain a certain level of access to ask for their help, and likewise the journalists would need to participate in an economic support stream.

I would in this way try to create a viable small community that lives in and around the technical system, with human feedback paths that would tend to keep it viable and stable. Not a simple task that can be dashed off in an afternoon, but without doing it the system would be doomed.

The embedded human aspects qualify this as a ‘golemic’ system as opposed to a ‘robotic’ system – something that I explored in the 1979 Journal of the West Coast Computer Faire (‘The Golemic Approach’), which postulates ‘golemic’ systems that incorporate humans into their feedback paths as counterposed to ‘robotic’ systems which have no human component in their feedback paths. It’s the reason I named my corporation ‘Golemics, Inc.’ – a reaction to Norbert Wiener’s book God and Golem,
Incorporated.