The Fire Next Time
I think that I’m going to devote the next few posts to a new take on the history of artificial intelligence. By “new” I mean that I’ve blogged about this topic before, but I want to take a fresh look at it. Anyway that’s my intention, and that’s what I’m doing in this week’s post.
We Didn’t Start the Fire (We Just Wrote a Book)
In the early 1980s, while working at InfoWorld, a newsweekly freshly created to cover the nascent personal computer industry, Paul Freiberger and I wrote a book called Fire in the Valley. (Fourth edition coming RSN.)
We were spending our days talking with people you’ve heard of, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and people you’ve maybe heard of, like Lee Felsenstein and Ted Nelson and Gary Kildall, and people you maybe haven’t heard of but maybe should, like Bill Godbout and Tom Pittman and John Draper and Ed Roberts and Bob Frankston and Wayne Green. But when we finished interviewing them about their new product or project, we’d ask them how it all began, and they’d let their hair down and tell us the stories that became our book. These were the people who brought about the personal computer revolution.
The revolution we document in Fire in the Valley was a response to a threat.
Or really it was three distinct threats.
In the 1960s, technology, particularly computer technology, was perceived as a threat to our humanity, suppressing our individuality. The student revolt on college campuses in the 60s was in large part a revolt against regimentation. “I am not a number. I am a free man!” declared the protagonist of the 60s TV series The Prisoner, known in the series only as “Number Six.” To the computers processing enrollment on campuses, a student was a number; to the draft board, another number. The punch cards represented students and their class choices as numbers bore the warning “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.” Students took it as a battle cry. Activist Mario Savio gave voice to it:
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”
It wasn’t just on college campuses that computers were having an impact. By 1960 it was clear that computers posed a real and measurable threat to family income: automation was eliminating jobs.
“I regard it as the major domestic challenge … of the ’60s,” President Kennedy said in 1962, “to maintain full employment at a time when automation … is replacing men.“
The Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962 was passed to retrain the victims of automation. Jobs impacted ranged from automobile mechanics, service station attendants, and welders to draftsmen, electronics data processors, laboratory technicians, and typists.
And then there was the amorphous but unnerving threat of “artificial intelligence.” Looming behind the direct threat that computers and automation presented to workers performing routine mechanical tasks, there was the ominous menace of thinking machines. It was one thing for machines to outpace us in those tasks, but what if they can outthink us?
As early as 1957, the threat was sufficiently widespread that it could serve as the premise of a movie. In The Desk Set, an office full of researchers is at risk of being replaced by a computer that answered questions like — well, like a modern chatbot.
If computers were thinking machines, and if they could perform actions faster and more accurately than humans, how long would it be before computers could outthink humans?
Thirty years, Marvin Minsky predicted. Minsky, the head of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, once glibly predicted that “in thirty years we should have machines whose intelligence is comparable to man’s.”
Of course that did not happen — not then.
(To be fair, Minsky also predicted human-level machine intelligence in — quoting John McCarthy — “four to four hundred years,” a generous range.)
FOMO
The electronic hobbyists and other computer pioneers we profiled in Fire in the Valley felt these threats, but also had a different fear: FOMO. The acronym hadn’t been coined yet but the fear existed: the Fear Of Missing Out. Something fascinating and important was happening, something world-changing, and they were being shut out of it. The hobbyists weren’t think as much about people being controlled by computers, as about computers being controlled — programmed — by people. Controlling the computer was a nexus of power and creativity, and it was locked up in temperature-controlled rooms tended by a white-coated computer priesthood.
They responded, not as Mario Savio urged, by putting their “bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers” to make them stop, but by taking control of the gears and wheels and levers themselves.
They photocopied computer documentation and descriptions of processor instruction sets and scrounged for parts and soldered and wire-wrapped and enlisted friends to help with assembly and took out ads in electronics magazines and stuffed components into baggies for shipping — and they shared what they learned with one another, in clubs and conferences and newsletters and in a bar in Menlo Park, California with peanut husks on the floor.
And they built an industry, seizing an opportunity ignored by the mainframe and minicomputer companies of the day. In 1980, Apple went public, instantly making 300 millionaires. And there were other personal computer companies then just as successful as Apple.
That they were able to do this was due to a unique confluence of circumstances, but they did, through their actions, participate in a second industrial revolution.
The Fire Next Time
Now we have this new thing: generative artificial intelligence. Although it has deep roots in AI research, it is a new thing. It is a startling breakthrough in machine intelligence, startling even the developers who wrote the code. And it threatens to bring about another industrial revolution, one in which the same three threats are emerging.
Fifty years ago, Ted Nelson wrote, “You can and must understand computers now.” Today, it is equally imperative that we understand generative artificial intelligence. The question is: Can we? I’m going to say the answer is a qualified yes, and I want to see how far we can get down that path.
But first: Even to refer to the computer revolution or the era of generative artificial intelligence as an industrial revolution is to acknowledge the historical significance of the first industrial revolution. And it turns out that the threats posed in that revolution were essentially these same threats: to our humanity, to our jobs and livelihood, and even to our very existence.
I want to start this exploration by going still further back in time, to the first industrial revolution. Maybe we can learn something from that first era.
To be continued.
Of Interest
When I was editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, we had a section in the back of the magazine titled “Of Interest.” Here are some things that I think you might find Of Interest.
Blogroll
This feature is on hiatus. I’m working on a better way to promote the blogs and sources I follow. I recently saw what Dave Winer is doing with his blogroll and I thought maybe I could up my game. New approach coming soonish.
First Verses: The Sonnet
Just five iambic feet comprise each line,
The lines themselves arranged in groups of four,
With every other line coerced to rhyme
While striving to make sound and sense accord.
The first eight lines lay out the argument,
Attired in the fitting metaphor
You’ve stitched and patched and labored to invent:
They pose a problem to be puzzled o’er.
But there’s a turn in lines from nine through twelve
To puzzle o’er the problem that was posed.
Arranged in groups of four the lines themselves
Take up the final quatrain’s burden so
The closing couplet can the key expose
To bring the sonnet to a pleasing close.
From my book First Verses, available soon.
The Bookshelf
My day job these days is as a development editor of tech books for The Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Coming Attractions
Thanks for reading. You can read all the back issues of Swaine’s World at my blog home. In the coming weeks, I expect to continue this exploration of the history of artificial intelligence. Along the way you might also see more Swaine’s Flames flashbacks, Dirt Road Diaries, news bulletins from the AI revolution, or posts on general tech history and some of my favorite books.
Got the 3rd edition of Fire in the Valley here on the table. Slowly working my way through it. Do you just add material as you come out with new editions, or are you removing bits, too?