it's about finding the optimal balance of human intellect and machine augmentation. AI is just a tool.

That's the gist.

And I'm half wondering if it really did pull some of those ideas forward in time from Walt Whitman in some sense?

I'm not familiar with Whitman's work but that's entirely possible.

I wish I had time to try and get a community running.

Totally understandable. Running a community is no easy task. Maybe you could do in future with a clearer vision and with some help from people who share the same vision.

Maybe such a community could use things like requiring minimum burn percentages or subscription payments to a multikey community moderation account in order to limit spam.

I still think burning should be done on large scale by bigger accounts to get significant results. (It's a debate for another time.) I'm really intrigued by this "multisig" development. I just read a couple of articles through the link you attached. As much as it makes sense to use it for AI themed community, it's completely viable for the rest as well... I'm curious as to why this feature is still not used by communities heavily supported by steemcurators.