An Interview with John Markoff

▮ The Nexus:  First of all, congratulations on the publication of Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand in China! The title itself hints at the many roles and identities Brand has taken on over the years. In your opinion, which role do you think best captures the essence of Stewart Brand¹: countercultural pioneer, environmentalist, digital visionary, or something else entirely, and why?

John Markoff: It is challenging to assign just one attribute to Brand. He has made a variety of contributions in areas ranging from his impact on culture during the 1960s, environmental activism during 1970s, social networks during the 1980s, as an author, philosopher and critic in the 1990s and even more recently on issues related to climate change and sustainability. I think today perhaps he can best be understood as a role model of how to live in the world. His approach was described by Steve Jobs in a 2005 Stanford commencement address in the phrase he quoted from the Whole Earth Catalog²:  “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.”  It was something that Brand had used as an end note when he stopped publishing the Catalog in 1971. It described his philosophy of life.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

John Markoff: I tried to follow the advice of the famous biographer Robert Caro³ when researching someone’s life:  “Turn every page.” Brand had given his papers to the Stanford library and I spent a year and half reading in the archive. The most unexpected discovery, however, was finding a journal that he had not donated to the archive, which I referred to as “the lost journal.”  In it there is a cryptic note that he made in 1966 when he decided to move to Menlo Park, California rather than going “back to the land” with many of his friends. He was intrigued by the early computer technology world that was emerging there and he was one of the first to note its existence. Brand has done this repeatedly – discovered some important trend and then has been the first to report it to the broader world. Finding that journal changed the way I interpreted the Whole Earth Catalog. This was a half decade before Silicon Valley was named, and yet all of the forces that would make the Valley were visible. The Catalog, subtitled “access to tools,” was the first notice to a broader American community that something significant was happening on the San Francisco Peninsula.

John Markoff: In researching Brand’s biography I came to see the Catalog in a new light. It certainly was very influential within the community of tech pioneers in the Valley. For example, Alan Kay⁴, the creator of the Dynabook, the forerunner to modern personal computers, asked the librarian at Xerox PARC to order all of the books mentioned in an early version of the Catalog. However, what the Catalog really was, was a message from Silicon Valley that something very remarkable was underway and that it would transform the way that humans use tools. At the time that Brand began the Catalog he was very influenced by Buckminster Fuller⁵, who argued that if you want to change the world, the best way to do it is to give someone the tool and teach them how to use it. The subtitle to the Catalog was “access to tools.”  Stewart Brand was an early messenger to millions of Americans that computing was about to change the world.

John Markoff: This is a great question and one that I think I have a bit of a disappointing answer to. I had hoped that my biography might resonate with young people who are more concerned about the impact of climate change, but I don’t think I was successful in reaching them with Brand’s message about the value and the importance of a planetary consciousness. The pull of nationalism is very strong globally today and I think it is a tremendous impediment – it is good only for starting wars and dividing peoples.

John Markoff:  I edited my college newspaper, but initially decided that I wanted to go to graduate school in the social sciences. In 1977 I decided that I wanted to be a reporter and so I left school and moved back to Palo Alto where I had grown up. I gave myself five years of working as a freelancer, trying to find my way to journalism without going to journalism school. The personal computer industry had just begun and I was attracted to the hobbyist culture in Silicon Valley. I also read a book by Christopher Evans⁶ called The Micro Millenium which argued that the microprocessor would transform the world. That seemed like both an interesting thesis and a potential reporting beat. Ultimately I would be hired as part of the first staff for InfoWorld, a weekly newspaper reporting on the new PC industry. I then moved to Byte Magazine, which was a technical hobbyist publication where I was able to immerse myself and gain a better understanding of digital systems. Finally the San Francisco Examiner decided they wanted to expand their coverage of Silicon Valley and so they hired me as a technology writer. Being a journalist covering Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s was an immense amount of fun. Ultimately The New York Times would hire me because of my expertise in covering Silicon Valley.

John Markoff: It depends on what you mean by “news.”  There is Orwell’s⁸ supposed dictum (he apparently didn’t actually say this):  “News is what someone doesn’t want you to know, everything else is public relations.” I think many aspects of what has traditionally been news gathered by humans can be automated. Long ago I saw an AI demo done by researchers at Intel Labs where they created an automatic highlight reel from a basketball game from just monitoring crowd sounds. I immediately realized that something similar could be done at the city council meeting. I think it will be hardest to automate what is traditionally thought of as investigative reporting, but it will depend on how much progress is made in large language model related technologies. I am generally a skeptic on the overbloom claims of rapid progress, but clearly AI has mastered language to a significant degree, opening new vistas for displacing human labor.  

John Markoff: I have thought about this a lot and tried to deal with it to various degrees in three books⁹ that I’ve written. What distinguishes Silicon Valley from many other parts of the world is that it is remarkably multicultural – as distinct from integrated. Over more than five decades the Valley has served as a magnet for the best and the brightest from around the globe. The resulting innovation community is unique. That said I also believe that the original emergence of the Valley was in part serendipitous. Scientists at the Santa Fe Institute have described the idea of creativity on the edge of chaos. That precisely identified the environment around the three laboratories – Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the SRI Augmentation Research Center and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center from which the personal computer and the modern internet arose. The importance of the “big ideas” that came from these laboratories – personal computing, networking and ubiquitous computing – is generally underestimated in terms of driving innovation in particular directions.

John Markoff: I think the so-called “internet time”  – a concept posed by Intel’s Andy Grove¹⁰ – has generally moved the Valley away from long term thinking. Stewart Brand and to a greater degree Danny Hillis¹¹, were dismayed by the increasing influence of short term financial market oriented behavior, but beyond the ideas espoused by the Long Now Foundation, I don’t see much real movement in that direction. Particularly when you are in bubbles like the current AI hype cycle, there is a little indication of the Valley’s metabolism slowing. I think there was a step function in acceleration with the advent of computer networks and I see very little in the way of countervailing forces. 

Let me give you three examples of long term research projects, which were not commercially oriented and completely transformed the digital world.  1. Doug Engelbart’s NLS system¹², funded by DARPA over almost a decade, led to the development of a wide range of computing and networking technologies that today define the modern computing world. 2. Alan Kay’s Dynabook prototype evolved over roughly a decade at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to lead directly to the modern portable personal computer and tablet computing technologies that are virtually everywhere in society today. And 3. Mark Weiser pioneered the idea of “ubiquitous computing” during the 1980s at PARC. His idea was that microprocessors would transform everyday objects such as the telephone and the paper notebook, and they would disappear as computers and become “magic.” Today, that world is known as the “Internet of Things.”

John Markoff: As I said above, the most significant influence on my own perspective was a book I read in 1977 when I first began work as a reporter in Silicon Valley. Written by British computer scientist Christopher Evans, The Micro Millenium was an extended argument that the microprocessor was going to transform human civilization. After reading his book, I thought, “well that would make a good reporting beat.” That has turned out to be true. Otherwise, there have been a handful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and engineers who have been extremely influential on my thinking:  Alan Kay, who argued that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points,” Doug Engelbart¹³, who was the first to understand the implication of semiconductor scaling and Mark Weiser¹⁴, who believed that computers should disappear into everyday objects, making them magical, come to mind.

Let me give you one significant moment for me as a reporter. In 1989, I visited one of the first massively parallel computer companies – Kendall Square Research in Cambridge, Mass. While there they demonstrated their computer architecture which was based on a microprocessor that had been manufactured on the same fabrication line as the Sharp Wizard¹⁵ – then a common consumer product. I realized that technology was increasingly being driven by the consumer electronics industry. This was a reversal of the previous decades in which technologies would be pioneered by corporate and military researchers and then trickle down to consumer markets. After seeing this I would describe the process as “in the future the world’s fastest computers will be made by companies that make products that go under Christmas Trees.” The Sony Playstation and the XBox were early examples.

John Markoff: There has been a great deal of reporting on the increasing role of algorithms in manipulating human behavior. There are efforts to regulate these technologies and they are being bitterly opposed by US technology companies. The reality is that the algorithms are generally the foundation of business models and are used to increase profitability. I am even more concerned about the potential of the “borg,” a reference to the alien species in the StarTrek series that would say “resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.”  Efforts to design brain computer interfaces need to be watched very carefully. I think that it is crucial to maintain a bright line between what is human and what is machine. 

▮ The Nexus: Having covered AI for years, you’ve spoken with many key figures in the industry. How do their perspectives on AI’s future differ, and what drives those differences? Could you provide specific examples of the most contrasting views you’ve seen? 

John Markoff：There is a broad spectrum of beliefs about the rate and direction of AI technologies among the community of AI designers in Silicon Valley. I think the challenge is to separate science from science fiction. In 2012, Robert Geraci, a professor of religion wrote Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality. The book focused on parallels between religious and technological belief systems. Today there is still a large religious component in the debates about how quickly and how powerful AI will be. I think this is all exacerbated by our tendency to anthropomorphize almost everything we come in contact with from our pets to our machines. The Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence, where I have been writer-in-residence in the past, is actively trying to hash out some of the ethical consequences of this debate.

The clearest example today in Silicon Valley is the dichotomy between several groups who believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will take place in the near term – before the end of the decade vs. those who believe that the current generation of large language models are now dramatically slowing in their rate of improvement. There are also those who believe that these systems are on the cusp of consciousness in contrast to those who are skeptics and point out the human tendency toward anthropomorphism.

▮ The Nexus: How do you think we can address the challenge posed by AI hallucinations¹⁶, especially when these fabrications can seem highly credible to readers? What safeguards should be considered to enhance the safe and responsible use of AI?

John Markoff: First, in my own use I have not seen consistent progress in reducing the problem of hallucinations. That said, I have seen a wide variety of proposals for solving this problem. On the question of AI safety I support those who have argued in favor of regulatory controls. Companies should be held liable for the safety of their systems and forced to demonstrate that they are safe.

Notes:

1. Stewart Brand is an American writer, environmentalist, and counterculture icon best known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog, a groundbreaking publication that became a cornerstone of the counterculture movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Brand has consistently championed innovative approaches to global challenges, from environmental preservation to technological advancement. He founded several influential projects, including The WELL, an early online community, and the Long Now Foundation, which fosters long-term thinking and projects like the 10,000-Year Clock. 
2. The Whole Earth Catalog was a counterculture-era publication created by Stewart Brand in 1968. It served as a DIY guide and resource hub, offering tools, books, and ideas for self-sufficiency, ecological living, and personal empowerment. Often described as a precursor to the internet, it emphasized access to tools and information, fostering a generation of thinkers, makers, and environmentalists seeking to reshape society. 
3. Robert Caro is an acclaimed American journalist and  biographer known for his meticulous research and compelling narratives. His works include The Power Broker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of urban planner Robert Moses, and The Years of Lyndon Johnson, a multi-volume series exploring the life and influence of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
4. Alan Kay is a renowned American computer scientist and pioneer in object-oriented programming. He is best known for his work at Xerox PARC, where he conceived the Dynabook concept, a key  forerunner of laptop and tablet computers and the e-book. His ideas have significantly influenced the development of personal computing and user interface design. 
5. Richard Buckminster Fuller was a renowned American architect, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. His work spanned multiple disciplines, including architectural design, systems theory, and technological innovation. Fuller is best known for inventing the geodesic dome and coining terms like “Spaceship Earth” and “Dymaxion.” He held 28 U.S. patents and published over 30 books. His groundbreaking ideas and designs have had a profound impact on modern architecture and technology. 
6. Christopher Evans (1931–1979) was a British computer scientist, writer, and psychologist. In 1979, he published The Mighty Micro: The Impact of the Computer Revolution (released in the U.S. as The Micro Millennium), in which he predicted that the computer revolution would have an even more profound impact than the Industrial Revolution. Evans explored the essence of computers and demonstrated how the widespread adoption of microprocessors would fundamentally transform modern life.
7. Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) was a Canadian philosopher and one of the most influential media theorists of the 20th century. His work focused on how media shape human cognition and social organization, particularly in the context of technological innovation. McLuhan introduced the famous concept “The Medium is the Message,” emphasizing that the medium itself has a far greater impact on society and culture than the content it conveys.
8. George Orwell (1903–1950) was a British novelist, essayist, journalist, and social critic, renowned for his powerful critiques of totalitarianism and social injustice. His most famous works, Animal Farm and 1984, explore themes of oppression, propaganda, and surveillance.
9. These three books are What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (2005), Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015) and Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (2022). John Markoff also co-authored three other books: The High Cost of High Tech (1985) with Lenny Siegel; Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (1991) with Katie Hafner; and Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick (1995) with Tsutomo Shimomura.
10. Andrew Stephen Grove (1936–2016) was a Hungarian-American engineer, entrepreneur, and business leader who played a pivotal role in shaping the semiconductor industry. As the third CEO of Intel, Grove helped transform the company into a global leader in microprocessors, driving the personal computer revolution. 
11. Daniel Hillis (born 1956) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist known for pioneering parallel computers in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, which was a supercomputer manufacturer and AI company. He also proposed the 10,000-year clock project, inspiring the creation of The Long Now Foundation, which he co-founded with Stewart Brand. 
12. The NLS (oN-Line System) was a groundbreaking computer collaboration system developed by Douglas Engelbart and his team in the 1960s. It introduced revolutionary concepts like hypertext, the computer mouse, screen windowing and presentation programs. Designed to augment human intelligence, it allowed users to edit text, share screens, and link documents, laying the foundation for modern computing and influencing the development of personal computers and the Internet.  
13. Doug Engelbart (1925–2013) was an American engineer and inventor, recognized as a pioneer in computer science for his groundbreaking contributions to human-computer interaction. While working at the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), he invented the computer mouse and played a key role in developing hypertext, networked computing, and early prototypes of graphical user interfaces. These innovations were first showcased in the iconic 1968 "Mother of All Demos," which significantly advanced the evolution of computer technology.   
14. Mark Weiser (1952–1999) was an American computer scientist known as the father of ubiquitous computing. While serving as Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser introduced the concept of "ubiquitous computing," envisioning a world where technology seamlessly integrates into everyday life, becoming invisible, rather than relying solely on traditional computing devices. His groundbreaking ideas not only shaped the field of computer science but also laid the foundation for the development of smart devices and the Internet of Things. 
15. The Sharp Wizard is a series of  portable electronic devices, released by Sharp Corporation, that integrate features like scheduling,  calendars and address books, replacing traditional paper organizers. 
16. AI hallucination refers to the phenomenon where AI systems, particularly generative models, produce content that appears realistic or credible but is actually entirely fabricated or incorrect. This issue is especially prevalent in systems based on large-scale language models.
    
    

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