“When looms weave by themselves, man’s slavery will end.“ I happened upon that ancient line from Aristotle in 1964, in a New York Times article on automation and employment. It has shaped my imagination and career ever since. I learned to program during a summer job at Bell Labs, and was thrilled at how computers could end certain forms of drudgery. Then, around 1970, three experiences brought the future into focus. At a conference, I saw Doug Engelbart reprise his famous 1968 “Mother of All Demos” on augmenting human intelligence as contrasted to early notions of artificial intelligence, and also, I clicked on an implementation of Ted Nelson’s seemingly magical hyperlinks. Third, I delved into early concepts for augmenting human collaboration, as enabled by Murray Turoff’s computerized Delphi conferencing.
In those early days of the digital technology revolution, I saw glimpses of the future of computing and networking that Steve Jobs later described as “bicycles for our minds.” My interests in epistemology, psychology, history, media, and economics added sociotechnical dimensions to that vision. Around 1990, working on financial market data news feeds, I saw how individual traders could select analytics filters. Then, around 2003, I proposed designs for an ecosystem of tools for collaborating on open innovation.
Like many of those early pioneers in computing, I took it as a given that these new tools would be customizable to serve their individual users, and that they would promote freedom and enhance democracy. But that vision turned sour in recent decades. The corporate platformization of social media and the web spoiled their potential to enhance freedom, ultimately threatening democracy and ‘enshittifying’ our bicycles for the mind. Now a similar set of phenomena is emerging around artificial intelligence, as the potential for AI tools to serve users is coopted into business models that steal our agency and extract our value to enable corporations, oligarchs, and authoritarians to steer us to what amounts to junk food and toxins for the mind.
