The IA advance which is most obvious to me (yet somehow not yet a reality) is the nomenclator.<p>In Rome, a nomenclator was a slave who remembered people's names for you, and as they approached would whisper to you that this is Gaius Tullius Castor, his wife is Flaminia, his eldest boy is Marcus, and he owns beanfields.<p>A Google Glass camera on your eyeglasses and a speaker in your ear, hooked up to Facebook's face recognition and social web, can tell you a quick precis of who you see across the room before they get to you. Add a touch sensor in your pocket or on a ring for unobtrusive control, and a mic to pick up your annotations or commands, and you've got a product that should be a major hit by the second generation.
<i>"[...] good notation is worth a whopping increment in IQ points. Except that the really good ones allow one to have thoughts that are impossible without."</i><p>I posit this post tangentially explains the nagging feeling that many parents[1] experience when their children struggle with mathematics. The benefits of basic language literacy are clear, but follow-on analogies such as the above emphasize a point of view concluding that an inability to attain mathematical fluency excludes the next generation from any implied augmented intelligence benefits.<p>The extrapolated message would be that mathematically disinclined adults will then be completely unable to comprehend certain important thoughts in [insert arcane, highly-specialized technical field].<p>Regarding the question posed by the title and last sentence in the blog post, I'm not sure why the thrust is framed as an XOR, and not as an AND. It's not like we can't focus on both IA and AI at the same time.<p>[1] Anecdata warning: I am a parent. I have this nagging feeling.
It seems obvious to me that IA is where the tremendous benefits to society occur. Imagine a world where everyone has the equivalent of a genius IQ today. A lot of problems suddenly disappear.<p>AI, on the other hand, while very useful, doesn't change people. And frankly, most problems we have are because people lack understanding. I don't know about you, but I don't actually want to replace mankind with something else, I just want us all better.<p>Of course, what "better" is--is highly debatable, so that definitely gives pause as well.
EDW387 [0] (which doesn't have NN0 or NN1 pseudonyms either) seems to be pretty clear about what the "anti-intellectualism" comment was about.<p>>The undisguised appeal to anti-intellectualism and anti-individualism was frightening. He was talking about his "augmented knowledge workshop" and I was constantly reminded of Manny Lehman's vigorous complaint about the American educational system that is extremely "knowledge oriented", failing to do justice to the fact that one of the main objects of education is the insight that makes quite a lot of knowledge superfluous.<p>Wish the author went into more detail on why now may be different than during Kay/Engelbart's time.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD387.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/E...</a>
The EWD by Dijkstra now actually mentions Engelbart by name: <a href="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD387.PDF" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD387.PDF</a>.
John Markoff's new book "Machines of Loving Grace" is a great one about this AI vs IA topic. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common-Between/dp/0062266683" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common-Between/d...</a>
> The point I am making here is that Engelbart and Kay were unrealistic in expecting that their technologies would give quick results in the way of Tools for Thought. They had no appreciation for the vast and rich culture that produced the tools for thought enabled by the traditional technologies of writing and printing. They did not realize that a similar culture needs to arise around a new technology with augmentation potential.<p>I am guilty of deifying Englebart and Kay, and castigating "our society" for failing them. After my honeymoon period with the "tool of thought" people, I've calmed down.<p>Here's my radical belief: portability is for people who can't write their own programs. (copped from a Torvalds witticism)<p>Consider writing and literacy: If you really grow up in a literate culture, you can start with a blank page and end with a bespoke document that suits your needs. If you don't grow up in that, you have to modify others' documents. This limits you. Hallmark cards are for people who can't write poetically (no judgment intended).<p>So too for programming. Today we rely on hundreds of millions of lines of code of others we can't even realistically modify. But I think the future resembles Forth: in less than a hundred lines of code, you write something that suits your needs[0]. You can't do this yet because computers suck.<p>I'm talking loosely and at a high-level.<p>[0] I think Forth is a powerful vision for the future: no operating system, no types, no compatibility, no syntax. An executable english language.
Great piece. I got a chance to work with Douglas Engelbart several years ago and wrote up some responses in reply to Maarten's IA or AI post: <a href="http://codinginparadise.org/ebooks/html/blog/ia_vs__ai.html" rel="nofollow">http://codinginparadise.org/ebooks/html/blog/ia_vs__ai.html</a>
Nothing is more high-tech than culture, it's <i>everything</i> even if we tend to work over the seemingly faceless Internet these days - it's people all the way down.
The idea of "notation as intelligence augmentation" is the reason (or one of them) that Haskell programmers are so enthusiastic about things like functors and monads; type theory is its own branch of mathematics that could be appended in the list of things like calculus and vector analysis [1], and might bring in the same kind of new levels of thought and abstraction.<p>[1] Disclaimer; I am not a mathematician.
When considering intelligence amplification, the book that comes to mind is <i>Psychohistorical Crisis</i>, by Donald Kingsbury. Computer-to-brain interfaces may go a long way in the next few thousand years.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistorical_Crisis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistorical_Crisis</a>
oblig. <a href="https://xkcd.com/903/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/903/</a><p>We already have amplified memory (see also: books, mnemonics). and google amplifies <i>retrieval</i>.<p>But what is "intelligence", that we might amplify it? For me, limited short-term working memory is an obstacle (EWD's "limited size of skull"). As complexity is added, earlier parts drop out.<p>There is the "technology" of hierarchical decomposition and the pyschological instinct of chunking, but every problem has irreducible complexity... if this is greater than my working memory, I cannot grasp it.<p>Artificially enhanced working memory may help here, but I suspect the limit is due not so much short-term memory itself, but it having associations throughout all long-term memory. That is, it's less a cache limit than a bandwidth limit, interconnecting with the entire mind. We aren't Von Neumann architectured.<p>PS: there's an argument that we might not be able to grasp intelligence itself, if its and its components' irreducible complexity is greater than any person's working memory - even if we formalize a correct model, we mightn't grasp it ourselves. Thus, IA may be essential for AI. Or, AI is essential for AI.