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An Interview with Timothy Leary

by Denise Caruso


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Timothy Leary, one of the founders of humanistic psychology in the 1950s, gained both fame and infamy in the 1960s when he began experiments with psychedelic drugs such as LSD. During the past several years Leary has been focusing on the use of personal computers -- and more specifically, what he calls very highly interactive software -- as a harbinger of "the next wave" of evolution for human society. Toward this end Leary has designed a programming language called SKIPI (Super Knowledge Information Processing Intelligence) that enhances self-knowledge by issuing underlying psychological tests to evaluate each person's responses.

Q:) HOW WILL YOU BE USING SKIPI?

A:) Right now I'm using SKIPI in a "book" based on Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn." When you start you can pick who you want to be, Becky Thatcher or Tom Sawyer. It asks you questions about yourself, like "Are you adventurous or timid?" And you have choices. When Huck goes out the window to meet Tom in the bushes, who's there, Tom or Becky? Now if you're a girl and you say Becky, it becomes a Nancy Drew thing of the two girls going down the river with Huck. But every choice in any of these books is coded with something we call "me mes". They're the elements of human behavior that are passed on, just like genes pass on genetic traits. As you determine the narrative, it's a projective psychological test that gets fed back to you with these profiles and characteristics. And there's a master data file for SKIPI, which you can access your whole library. It knows what scores you got, your frustration tolerance, whether you prefer math to spatial problem solving...

Q:) ALL ON FLOPPIES?

A:) Its the easiest thing in the world. It takes up less memory than Donkey Kong.

Q:) WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF CREATING THIS VERY HIGHLY INTERACTIVE SOFTWARE?

A:) It's the next wave. Everything that's happening today is the function of changing from an industrial, smokestack, material civilization to an information, communication, intelligence civilization. In the industrial age we're categorized by our professions. So this one's a carpenter, and (there's) a lawyer and a writer and an artist. But if you're an artist, then what am I? An artee? an art victim? With highly interactive software, everyone in the new age will be an author. Robots will do all the work that professions used to do. And everyone will be freed.

Q:) IT SEEMS THAT YOU COULD ALSO BE ROBBED OF PURPOSE.

A:) Anyone who has committed himself to an industrial age profession and isn't willing to change -- too bad. Nothing comes easy in evolution. When you crawl out of the water, you got to deal with gravity and muggers and things.

Q:) BUT THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING TO REPLACE THAT SELF-WORTH.

A:) Exactly. The function of human life in the industrial age was to be a worker. Unemployment was dread. You lost your hope and pride if you didn't have a job. Well, the motto in the new age is, "Only robots and serfs and people in worker states work." The function of human life is to grow and evolve. We're here to simulate each other. The whole function of human life is now to be an author of your own experiences.

Q:) IS SKIPI A GAME OR AN EDUCATIONAL TOOL?

A:) It's an interactive adventure game, an educational adventure, personality processing, tests and feedback, an autobiography. But you end up with all these little disk "books" as your library.

Q:) SO IF SKIPI, OR SKIPI-LIKE PROGRAMS, ARE WIDELY ADOPTED, TH% mHOLE SYSTEM OF BOOKS AND EDUCATION AND LEARNING WOULD BE...

A:) Finished. What the Reagan adminstration says is, "We have to have more class hours, more homework, more of this and, less vacations." But there's still one teacher standing in front of 30 kids, each of whom is entirely different. George Leonard, a humanist psychologist in San Francisco, has got this plan. In the morning a kid would go to school and punch in and work on personal computer stuff, all tailored to the individual's personality, achievements, and so forth. Then in the afternoon, there'd be lectures, but it would be more like theater. You would read about Hamlet and Shakespeare, but in the afternoon you would act it out.

Q:) WHY ALL OF A SUDDEN ARE BOOKS OBSOLETE? WHY DO WE NEED TO INTERACT WITH OUR LEARNING MATERIAL?

A:) A book is now the way an oil painting was before Gutenberg invented the printing press. But an oil painting is not the way to communicate kno wledge information. You wouldn't carry one around to show what happened in Beirut or at the DeLorean trial.

Q:) ARE WE GOING TO START A REVOULTION WITH PERSONAL COMPUTERS?

A:) It's already happened. I see the '60s and '70s and '80s as a generation growing up. The '60s were kind of the teen-age part of it, and the '70s were kind of getting settled, and the '80s is the flowering of it. Bureaucracies are totally addicted and enslaved to mainframes. United Airlines and the Internal Revenue Service -- these things couldn't function without mainframes.

When you put control in the hands of individuals, however, we don't need security guards. The personal computer you keep at home. It's hooked up only to your brain or a collective brain. It's the ultimate egalitarian democracy.

 
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