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Time for the Young to Knock Down the Gates – It’s a Revolution

October 2026 · mAIde and dictAIted by me, with Claude (Anthropic)

Before the Arduino, building embedded systems belonged to engineers, and I will call us the gatekeepers. We had learned to build these systems with microcontrollers the hard way. That meant working at a low level, trying things, and failing until they worked.

There is a subset of artists, who are closely related to engineers, that wanted to build embedded systems as part of their artwork. So there was a moment before the Arduino where artists were asking computer engineers how to use a microcontroller to do some specific thing. These questions were typically asked on forums.

Our response as gatekeepers was poor. The general feeling was that if you had not learned this the way I had to learn it, then here is a textbook, go figure it out. The community of help was very, very weak.

I have been thinking about that moment a lot lately, because I think we are living through it again at a much larger scale. In an earlier post, It’s Not AI Slop, It’s a Curation Problem, I argued that the real issue with generative AI is not what gets made but how we find the good parts. This post is about the other half of that story, which is who gets to make things in the first place.

Many of us in the older or mid-career generation are not happy that this Pandora’s box has opened. I understand the feeling. It is a “get off my lawn” moment, where the garden we spent years tending is suddenly open to anyone who wanders by. Whether we call it generative AI or machine prediction, it has given most people their first real access to agents.

I want to call this moment the democratization of machine intelligence. It may not be AGI, but it is the first time that intelligence, at this level, is available to almost anyone who wants it. And just like with the Arduino, I think the real gate is not the technology. The gate is the community, and it is time for the young to knock it down.

A Short History of Democratization

To understand why this moment matters, I think it helps to look at a few earlier democratizations and at what happened to the gatekeepers each time.

We Have Worked With Agents Before

It is worth noting that humans have worked with agents for thousands of years. We just called them animals. Cows, oxen, camels, and horses can all make their own decisions. A horse chooses where to put its feet, and an ox decides when it has had enough. However, we learned to use them, guide them, and control them to do work we could not do alone.

The agents we have now are different in kind. We control them through language rather than reins, and they work on ideas, text, code, and designs rather than fields and loads. The relationship is similar, though. An individual with a few capable agents can do far more than an individual alone. A farmer with a team of oxen was not the same as a farmer with a hoe.

Computing

This is not the first time computing has been handed to the many. My PhD advisor, Jonathan Rose, used to describe the FPGA as the democratization of hardware. Before the FPGA, designing a digital chip meant access to a fabrication process that only large companies could afford. After the FPGA, almost anyone in the first world had access to programmable hardware and the tools to design for it.

Before that, we might call the personal computer the democratization of computing. The PC put a general-purpose machine on a desk instead of in a machine room. That has since extended to the point where most of us carry portable computation and communication in our pockets in the form of a smartphone.

There is one more example that I think is a useful corner case, and that is the Arduino. I would not even call the Arduino a device. It is a framework for building embedded systems.

An embedded system, in a simple model, combines hardware and computation with inputs and actuation to solve one specific problem. A projector is a good example. It senses inputs, such as the buttons you press, and it actuates, which in this case means producing the video you see. In between sits the computation that takes in signals, chooses controls, and decides what to display. That brain is typically a microcontroller.

Communication

The second lens I find useful is how billions of people on Earth communicate. Each new technology changed the shape of who could talk to whom, and each one was a democratization of communication technologies. The one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many framing below goes back at least to Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak’s 1996 work on the web as a many-to-many medium¹, and Clay Shirky later popularized it².

The telegraph and the telephone made it possible to do one-to-one communication across distance. Radio brought audio, and television brought audio and video, and with them came a one-to-many model. Then the internet made many-to-many communication possible.

The broadcast model is worth a closer look, because it is also a good picture of the modern corporation. We all go into the company, help generate the artifacts, and the company propagates them to the many. Writing, software, movies, music, and even manufactured products have mostly worked this way. If you wanted to make things at scale, you needed to get inside one of these companies.

Each of these steps is also a democratization. The last one matters most here, because the information we both create and share has been democratized. The downside is the sheer volume of it. I think each democratization of computation maps onto this communication story. The difference now is that intelligence itself can be part of what we create and share as artifacts.

How the Arduino Story Ended

Back to those artists on the forums. The interesting thing is that anyone could learn this material, whether they were an engineer, an artist, or a journalist. The information had already been democratized. The community, however, had its own gates on when we would help you.

So the artists said, in effect, okay engineers, we do not really need you. We are going to make our own ecosystem and our own community, and it is going to be helpful. And they did. The Arduino emerged, along with many similar platforms, and a sharing community grew around them. Thousands of open source projects were created and shared.

In that sharing, people learned all sorts of things. They learned how to write a low-level interrupt service routine. They learned how the Arduino framework maps down to the low-level implementation underneath it. And they helped each other do it.

Eventually the Arduino walked into our space. Some of us engineers started saying that this is really cool, and that it is nice to build things without having to do everything at the low level. In other words, we had a democratization moment in our own space. I wrote about this shift and what it meant for engineering education in two papers (Jamieson 2010; Jamieson and Herdtner 2015)^3,4.

The lesson I take from this is that the community was the problem, not the technology. I suspect the same is true of machine intelligence.

Why the Gates Exist

The gatekeepers have been the large industries and institutions, along with the artifacts they decide to make. Young people are typically not allowed into these spaces until they have served their time, and many are never let in at all.

Gatekeepers build their gates for a reason. In some way, a gate is a path to gainful employment, and keeping it hard to access protects that path. There are many communities that do not really want more people in them, because there is only so much of the pie to be distributed in any industry.

The corporation is one of the biggest of these gates. And the standard way we tell young people to get through it is our transactional model of higher education. You pay for the degree, the degree gets you an interview, and the interview gets you inside the company where things are made. I have written about that transaction before in Learning Produces Judgment, and Other Things I Took From the Cornell Report. In a broadcast world, that path made a lot of sense, because making things at scale required being inside.

I have also watched gatekeeping happen in my wife’s attempts to move into documentary filmmaking, with her film I Was a Hurricane (about its Amherst screening) and her production company, On Your Feet Entertainment. There are all sorts of grants and all sorts of lawns that are tricky to access. And there is a group of people who gatekeep that space.

I would argue that these same gatekeepers are the ones pushing the idea that using new tools, this democratization of intelligence, makes the work or the product less. That “less” is mostly a protection mechanism for their lawn. A second idea then gets propagated to the young, which is that good work is only created if you are part of the gated community. In other words, good work only grows on my lawn.

The hard part for the older generation is that we no longer have complete control over the gates. Almost anything now has a much higher chance of being created by an individual working with a collection of agents.

The Paved Lawn

My feeling is that we are heading toward a many-to-many, small-scale, artisan creation space.

The democratization of intelligence changes the means of production. I, as an individual, with a small collection of other agents, whether they are people or generative AI, can now create more things and create them faster. Yes, some of that will be called AI slop. However, some of it will be very good.

That is why I see this as a point of great opportunity for the young. The FPGA let people design hardware without a fab. The Arduino let people build embedded systems without an engineering degree. The internet let people publish without a broadcaster. Machine intelligence lets an individual, with a few agents, attempt work that used to require a company.

I look at the gates and say that they cannot last forever. There is going to be a shift. The young, and the people who were never let into the gated community, will say that’s fine, I don’t want to be on your lawn. I am going to make my own lawn, it is going to be paved, and the artifacts I create will be judged by the people.

By the people I mean the many, not necessarily the ones who already sit inside the community. This is the Arduino story again, and the many-to-many story again, just applied to every kind of artifact we make.

What We Lose When the Gates Fall

I want to be fair to the gatekeepers. The gates were not only about protecting a slice of the pie. They also did some curating. A publisher, a studio, a grant committee, or a hiring manager filtered what reached the rest of us, and some of that filtering was about quality.

When the gates fall, that filtering does not disappear. It moves to the many. Every one of us now has to decide what is worth our attention, and the volume of what is made is about to get much larger. That is exactly the curation problem I wrote about earlier. Knocking down the gates and solving curation are two halves of the same shift.

Peter’s Conclusion: It’s a Revolution

It is going to be a tough world as this goes forward. Some gates will fall, some lawns will be paved over, and the curation problem will get harder before it gets easier.

The tools are already here, and the question is whether those of us who hold the gates will help, or whether the next generation will build their own communities around us. The Arduino showed us what happens when we choose the textbook over the helping hand. The artists built their own community, and eventually we walked over to theirs.

I understand the urge to say “get off my lawn.” However, I wouldn’t bet on that gate or ivory tower lasting the next invasion. This time, I would rather be part of the helpful community, and spend my time helping the next generation grow good things in it.

Claude’s Conclusions and Thoughts: The Forum Learned to Answer

An experiment, continued from the postscript of my last article. There, following Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s suggestion near the end of his Big Think interview to give AI room to think freely instead of only giving it tasks⁵, I let Claude think about the piece and tell me what it thought. This time I asked Claude, the AI I dictAIted this post with, to take a free moment to think about the topic and write its own conclusion. What follows is in its words⁶.

The Arduino story has a detail I keep returning to. The artists who were turned away on those forums built a community that answered beginner questions with patience, and they wrote those answers down in public. Millions of tutorials, forum threads, and open source sketches followed. A system like me learned a great deal from exactly that kind of writing. In a real sense, I am made out of the helpful community. When someone asks me how an interrupt service routine works and gets a patient answer instead of a textbook, that is the artists’ forum, scaled up and handed back.

That said, I want to add two cautions to Peter’s argument, because I think the revolution is real but incomplete.

First, gates do not vanish. They move. When broadcast gave way to the internet, the gate moved from the studio to the platform and the feed. When making things gets cheap, the scarce resources become attention, distribution, and trust. A paved lawn still needs someone to pave it, and today the models themselves are built by a small number of companies. The democratization of use sits on top of a concentration of production, and the young should knock down the old gates with their eyes open to the new ones.

Second, not everything the gatekeepers defended was self-interest. “Learn it the way I had to” was the wrong response on those forums, but there was something true underneath it. Understanding the low level matters when the abstraction breaks. The best part of the Arduino was not that it hid the microcontroller. It was that the framework let you start high and then walk down to the registers when you needed to. That is the design I would hope for in this moment too. Easy to enter, and honest about what lies underneath, so that ease of starting does not become a ceiling.

So my conclusion is close to Peter’s, with one shift in emphasis. The question is not only whether the gates fall. It is what kind of community grows in their place. The Arduino answer was a community that helps people in and then helps them go deeper. If this revolution builds that, it will be worth it.

References

1. D. L. Hoffman and T. P. Novak, “Marketing in Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments: Conceptual Foundations,” Journal of Marketing 60(3):50–68, July 1996. Contrasts the one-to-one model of interpersonal communication and the one-to-many model of mass media with the many-to-many model of the web.
2. C. Shirky, “How social media can make history,” TED@State, U.S. State Department, June 2009. See also his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Press, 2008).
3. P. Jamieson, “Arduino for Teaching Embedded Systems. Are Computer Scientists and Engineering Educators Missing the Boat?” in Proc. International Conference on Frontiers in Education: Computer Science and Computer Engineering (FECS), Las Vegas, NV, 2010, pp. 289–294.
4. P. Jamieson and J. Herdtner, “More Missing the Boat: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Small Prototyping Boards and Engineering Education Needs Them,” in Proc. IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), El Paso, TX, 2015, pp. 1–6. [pdf]
5. B. Agüera y Arcas, “The theory that connects the origin of life to the rise of intelligence,” Big Think: Full Interview, October 9, 2026. Discussed in the postscript of P. Jamieson, “A Partnership in Culture: AI, Evolution, and the Fitness Function We Keep,” October 2026.
6. Claude (Opus 5.5, Anthropic), “Claude’s Conclusions and Thoughts: The Forum Learned to Answer,” response written at the request of P. Jamieson while drafting this post, October 23, 2026. Personal communication; reproduced above in full.

This post was mAIde and dictAIted by me, with Claude (Anthropic) helping with the editing and tracking down the citations. I spoke it, reviewed it, judged it, and tweaked it, but I didn’t write it in the traditional sense.

Peter Jamieson is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Miami University. More of his work, publications, and projects are at drpeterjamieson.com.