Ask HN: Are there any software or tech “monasteries”?

Just to chime in, I feel like I have a semi-spiritual connection to software & computing. I read "What the Doormouse Said" and "Where The Wizards Stay Up Late" and "Dream Machines" at a young enough age to deeply impress upon me a powerful feeling that (Douglas Engelbart style) "augmenting intellect" is the ur-purpose, an expanding relationship between human & computer. Non-computing books like "Non-zero: the Logic of Human Destiny" gave me a belief in emergence, in cooperation, in exploring together & unbounded potential, and computers felt like rich tools to seed ever more expressive & legible & malleable mediums for information & understanding to root, to make ever more visible & flexible & accessible & democratic processes.

In these contexts, it's been a difficult age to live through. There has been so much promise, so much potential, so many more capabilities growing about us. But the ends we put tech to are constantly disappointing, constantly feel controlled/controlling, less intertwingularized, less open. The industrialization has directly led to dis-interest, to taking for granted, to intensive massification of software. The realm of design feels dominated by low end concerns, by the big massive low end of making sure software is safe, inert, undangerous, has bigger & better training wheels. This era has been crushingly sad to see, for it's felt like no one has tried to foster a better expert relationship (or constructivism/constructionist-ness in general), has not tried to ennoble & enrich. Even within the computing ranks, it's incredibly hard to run into anyone who believes humanity might ever even want an engagement with computing. Almost universally the belief that humanity doesn't care, doesn't want to be involved, is actively dis-interested in tech rules. Which I am so sympathetic to, for a wide range of reasons: computing just doesn't work sometimes, and we are left at ends, confused, with few remediations, few awarenesses. It's no surprise we cannot imagine the consumer becoming more, beginning positive growthful relationships, when we have so rarely tried to build a richer environment than the consumer swill we push.

Along comes AI. AI feels like the exact opposite end of the spectrum of computing, not low but high, mightily high, and yet it still is a manifestation computing that does not directly empower us. It's ultra elite computing; a complete power house of computing, using massive massive massive number crunching beyond anything we could imagine. Unimaginably complex optimizers & learning networks. But again it's computing that lives within it's own world, that barely is understandable by even the elite of computing; before, computing was hard because more of it was moving behind the firewall, into the cloud, into deeper and deeper applications. This new frontier of computing is, on the other hand, not just proprietary & complex, but fundamentally far less legibile.

This is all to say, my church of computing also includes humankind in the relationship. It worships interrelations, is humanistic in it's core, not machinistic, machineist. I think there's definitely better possibilities for AI, but today, I would regard a Church of AI as the enemy of the good.

Guilty as charged!