Machines of Loving Grace (30 page)

In his office, Brooks keeps photos of the factory manufacturing line of Foxconn, the world’s largest contract maker of consumer electronics products.
They are haunting evidence of the kinds of drudgery he wants Baxter to replace.
Yet despite his obvious passion for automation and robotics, Brooks has remained more of a realist than many of his robotics and AI brethren in Silicon Valley.
Although robots are indeed sprouting legs and moving around in the world among us, they are still very much machines, in Brooks’s view.
Despite the deeply ingrained tendency of humans to interact with robots as if they have human qualities, Brooks believes that we have a long way to go before intelligent machines can realistically match humans.
“I’ll know they have gotten there,” he said, “when my graduate students feel bad about switching off the robot.”

He likes to torment his longtime friend and MIT colleague Ray Kurzweil, who is now chartered to build a Google-scale artificially intelligent mega-machine, after having previously gained notoriety for an impassioned and detailed argument that immortality is within the reach of the current human generation through computing, AI, and extraordinary dietary supplements.
“Ray, we are both going to die,” he has told Kurzweil.
Brooks merely hopes that a future iteration of Baxter will be refined enough to provide his elder care when the day comes.

T
he idea that we may be on the verge of an economy running largely without human intervention or participation (or accidents) isn’t new.
Almost all of the arguments in play today harken back to earlier disputes.
Lee Felsenstein is the product of this eclectic mix of politics and technology.
He grew
up in Philadelphia, the son of a mother who was an engineer and a father who was a commercial artist employed in a locomotive factory.
Growing up in a tech-centric home was complicated by the fact that he was a “red diaper baby.”
His father was a member of the U.S.
Communist Party, committed enough to the cause that he named Lee’s brother Joe after Stalin.
⁷
However, like many children of Party members, Lee wouldn’t learn that his parents were Communists until he was a young adult—he abruptly lost his summer college work-study position at Edwards Air Force Base, having failed a background investigation.

Lee’s family was secularly Jewish, and books and learning were an essential part of their childhood.
This would mean that bits and pieces of Jewish culture found their way into Lee’s worldview.
He grew up aware of the golem legend, Jewish lore that would come to influence his approach to the personal computing world that he in turn would help create.
The idea of the golem can be dated back to the earliest days of Judaism.
In the Torah, it connotes an unfinished human before God’s eyes.
Later it came to represent an animated humanoid creature made from inanimate matter, usually dust, clay, or mud.
The golem, animated using kabbalistic methods, would became a fully living, obedient, but only partially human creation of the holy or particularly blessed.
In some versions of the tale, the golem is animated by putting a parchment in its mouth, not unlike programming using paper tape.
The first modern robot in literature was conceived by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play
R.
U.
R.
(Rossum’s Universal Robots)
in 1921, and so the golem precedes it by several thousand years.

“Is there a warning for us today in this ancient fable?”
wonders R.
H.
MacMillan, the author of
Automation: Friend or Foe?,
a 1956 caution about the dangers of computerization of the workplace.
“The perils of unrestricted ‘push-button warfare’ are apparent enough, but I also believe that the rapidly increasing part that automatic devices are playing in the peace-time
industrial life of all civilized countries will in time influence their economic life in a way that is equally profound.”
⁸

Felsenstein’s interpretation of the golem fable was perhaps more optimistic than most.
Influenced by Jewish folklore and the premonitions of Norbert Wiener, he was inspired to sketch his own vision for robotics.
In Felsenstein’s worldview, when robots were sufficiently sophisticated, they would be neither servants nor masters, but human partners.
It was a perspective in harmony with Engelbart’s augmentation ideas.

Felsenstein arrived in Berkeley roughly a decade after Engelbart had studied there as a graduate student in the fifties.
Felsenstein became a student during the frenetic days of the Free Speech Movement.
In 1973, as the Vietnam War wound down, he set out alongside a small collective of radicals to create a computing utility that offered the power of mainframe computers to the community.
They found warehouse space in San Francisco and assembled a clever computing system from a cast-off SDS 940 mainframe discarded by Engelbart’s laboratory at Stanford Research Institute.
To offer “
computing
power to the people,” they set up free terminals in public places in Berkeley and San Francisco, allowing for anonymous access.

Governed by a decidedly socialist outlook, the group eschewed the idea of personal computing.
Computing should be a social and shared experience, Community Memory decreed.
It was an idea before its time.
Twelve years before AOL and the Well were founded, and seven years before dial-up BBSes became popular, Community Memory’s innovators built and operated bulletin boards, social media, and electronic communities from other people’s cast-offs.
The first version of the project lasted only until 1975 before shutting down.

Felsenstein had none of the anti-PC bias shared by both his radical friends and John McCarthy.
Thus unencumbered, he became one of the pioneers of personal computing.
Not only was Felsenstein one of the founding members of the Homebrew Computer Club, he also designed the Sol-20, an early hobbyist
computer released in 1976, followed up in 1981 with the Osborne 1, the first mass-produced portable computer.
Indeed, Felsenstein had a broad view of the impact of computing on society.
He had grown up in a household where Norbert Wiener’s
The Human Use of Human Beings
held a prominent place on the family bookshelf.
His father had considered himself not merely a political radical but a modernist as well.
Felsenstein would later write that his father, Jake, “was a modernist who believed in the perfectibility of man and the machine as the model for human society.
In play with his children he would often imitate a steam locomotive in the same fashion other fathers would imitate animals.”
⁹

The discussion of the impact of technology had been a common trope in the Felsenstein household in the late fifties and the early sixties before Felsenstein left for college.
The family discussed the impact of automation and the possibility of technological unemployment with great concern.
Lee had even found and read a copy of Wiener’s
God and Golem, Inc.,
published the year that Wiener had unexpectedly died while visiting Stockholm and consisting mostly of his premonitions, both dire and enthusiastic, about the consequences of machines and automation on man and society.
To Felsenstein, Wiener was a personal hero.

Despite his early interest in robots and computing, Felsenstein had never been enthralled with rule-based artificial intelligence.
Learning about Engelbart’s intelligence amplification ideas would change the way he thought about computing.
In the mid-1970s Engelbart’s ideas were in the air among computer hobbyists in Silicon Valley.
Felsenstein, and a host of others like him, were dreaming about what they could do with their own computers.
In 1977, the second year of the personal computer era, he listened to a friend and fellow computer hobbyist, Steve Dompier, talk about the way he wanted to use a computer.
Dompier described a future user interface that would be designed like a flight simulator.
The user would “fly” through
a computer file structure, much in the way 3-D computer programs now simulate flying over virtual terrain.

Felsenstein’s thinking would follow in Dompier’s footsteps.
He developed the idea of “play-based” interaction.
Ultimately he extended the idea to both user interface design and robotics.
Traditional robotics, Felsenstein decided, would lead to machines that would displace humans, but “golemics,” as he described it, using a term first introduced by Norbert Wiener, was the right relationship between human and machine.
Wiener had used “golemic” to describe the pretechnological world.
In his “The Golemic Approach,”
¹⁰
Felsenstein presented a design philosophy for building automated machines in which the human user was incorporated into a system with a tight feedback loop between the machine and the human.
In Felsenstein’s design, the human should retain a high level of skill to operate the system.
It was a radically different approach compared to conventional robotics, in which human expertise was “canned” in the robot while the human remained passive.

For Felsenstein, the automobile was a good analogy for the ideal golemic device.
Automobiles autonomously managed a good deal of their own functions—automatic transmission, braking, and these days advanced cruise control and lane keeping—but in the end people maintained control of their cars.
The human, in NASA parlance, remained very much in the loop.

Felsenstein first published his ideas as a manifesto in the 1979 Proceedings of the West Coast Computer Faire.
The computer hobbyist movement in the mid-1970s had found its home at this annual computer event, which was created and curated by a former math teacher and would-be hippie named Jim Warren.
When Felsenstein articulated his ideas, the sixties had already ended, but he remained very much a utopian: “Given the application of the golemic outlook, we can look forward, I believe, to a society in which rather than bringing about the displacement of people from useful and rewarding work, machines will effect a blurring of the distinction between work
and play.”
¹¹
Still, when Felsenstein wrote his essay in the late 1970s it was possible that the golem could evolve either as a collaborator or as a Frankenstein-like monster.

Although he was instrumental in elevating personal computing from its hobbyist roots into a huge industry, Felsenstein was largely forgotten until very recently.
During the 1990s he had worked as a design engineer at Interval Research Corporation, and then set up a small consulting business just off California Avenue in Palo Alto, down the street from where Google’s robotics division is located today.
Felsenstein held on to his political ideals and worked on a variety of engineering projects ranging from hearing aids to parapsychology research tools.
He was hurled back onto the national stage in 2014 when he became a target for Evgeny Morozov, the sharp-penned intellectual from Belarus who specializes in quasi-academic takedowns of Internet highfliers and exposing post-dot-com era foibles.
In a
New Yorker
essay
¹²
aiming at what he found questionable about the generally benign and inclusive Maker Movement, Morozov zeroed in on Felsenstein’s Homebrew roots and utopian ideals as expressed in a 1995 oral history.
In this interview, Felsenstein described how his father had introduced him to
Tools for Conviviality
by Ivan Illich, a radical ex-priest who had been an influential voice for the political Left in the 1960s and 1970s counterculture.
Felsenstein had been attracted to Illich’s nondogmatic attitude toward technology, which contrasted “convivial,” human-centered technologies with “industrial” ones.
Illich had written largely before the microprocessor had decentralized computing and he saw computers as tools for instituting and maintaining centralized, bureaucratic control.
In contrast, he had seen how radio had been introduced into Central America and rapidly became a bottom-up technology that empowered, instead of oppressed, people.
Felsenstein believed the same was potentially true for computing.
¹³

Morozov wanted to prove that Felsenstein and by extension
the Maker Movement that carries on his legacy are naive to believe that society could be transformed through tools alone.
He wrote that “society is always in flux” and further that “the designer can’t predict how various political, social, and economic systems will come to blunt, augment, or redirect the power of the tool that is being designed.”
The political answer, Morozov argued, should have been to transform the hacker movements into traditional political campaigns to capture transparency and democracy.

It is an impressive rant, but Morozov’s proposed solution was as ineffective as the straw man he set up and sought applause for tearing down.
He focused on Steve Jobs’s genius in purportedly not caring whether the personal computing technology he was helping pioneer in the mid-1970s was open or not.
He gave Jobs credit for seeing the computer as a powerful augmentation tool.
However, Morozov entirely missed the codependency between Jobs the entrepreneur and Wozniak the designer and hacker.
It might well be possible to have one without the other, but that wasn’t how Apple became so successful.
By focusing on the idea that Illich was only interested in simple technologies that were within the reach of nontechnical users, Morozov rigged an argument so he would win.