AI NEWS PAGE DOSSIER
Early commercial AI, a tablet company that lost, internet auctions, labor warnings — and a veteran founder still arguing with doomers.
Kaplan helped commercialize expert systems in the early AI industry, built GO's PenPoint tablet company and the Onsale internet auction, spent years writing about automation and work, then became a Stanford chronicler arguing that real AI risks matter more than extinction science fiction.
1981
Kaplan co-founded Teknowledge, an early artificial-intelligence company that commercialized expert systems and later became publicly traded.
RECEIPTS: Stanford FSIreported
1987
Kaplan became founding CEO of GO Corporation in 1987, helping define the early pen-computing and tablet-computer category through the PenPoint system.
RECEIPTS: Stanford FSIreported
1994
Kaplan co-founded Onsale in 1994, which Stanford describes as the world's first internet auction website; the company went public in 1997.
RECEIPTS: Stanford FSIreported
2015
Kaplan published 'Humans Need Not Apply,' focusing on wealth, work, automation, and the social consequences of artificial intelligence years before generative AI became a mass-market obsession.
RECEIPTS: Stanford FSIreported
2024
Kaplan published 'Generative Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know' while teaching the social and economic impact of AI at Stanford.
RECEIPTS: Stanford FSIreported
Sep 19, 2026
On The Good Fight, Kaplan argued that the AI extinction narrative is overstated and that attention should shift toward concrete, present-day risks from AI systems.
RECEIPTS: The Good Fightfirst-party