I have the honour of having met Douglas Engelbart, as well as attending a keynote he gave at a Hypertext conference. He struck me as such a gentle and wise man, and the disappointment palpable in his keynote that we, as a species, had not progressed further in augmenting the human intellect haunts me still.<p>Many years later, I noted in a hypertext conference presentation of my own that I thought the future would be cooler. But here we are.
For anyone interested in more contemporaenous context around Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center, the book "What the Dormouse Said" closely follows Engelbart's trials and tribulations amongst the other early personal computing visionaries of 1960's Stanford and the Mid-Peninsula, leading up to the Homebrew Computer Club:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club</a>
This is Engelbart himself talking about that document in a video recorded in 1986:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3PWet8fDk&t=575">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3PWet8fDk&t=575</a><p>That video is the best one I know of if you want to hear him talk about his ideas.<p>What he wanted was to use computers to <i>augment the intelligence of people</i>, not to replace it, what he called “collective IQ” because he considered that computers were to be tools at the service of people collaborating with each other.
Kagi's universal summarizer:
<a href="https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html" rel="nofollow">https://labs.kagi.com/ai/sum?url=https://www.dougengelbart.o...</a><p>Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework is a 1962 paper by Douglas Engelbart that outlines a framework for increasing human intellectual capabilities through the use of technology. The paper outlines a strategy for developing a system that would provide humans with the minute-by-minute services of a digital computer equipped with computer-driven cathode-ray-tube display, and developing new methods of thinking and working that allow the human to capitalize upon the computer's help. The paper also discusses the importance of structuring concepts and symbols to enable humans to comprehend and find solutions to complex problems, as well as the importance of automating the H-LAM/T system to increase the effectiveness of executive processes. The paper also outlines the use of time-sharing, light pens, and pushbuttons to communicate with the computer, as well as the use of associative-trail manipulation to improve the human's process structuring and executing capabilities. The paper concludes by discussing the importance of positive feedback in the research development process, and the potential for providing users with a basic general-purpose augmentation system from which they can construct special features to match their job and ways of working. The overall message of the paper is that technology can be used to augment human intellectual capabilities, and that this can be done through the development of sophisticated techniques for process and symbol structuring.
I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting Doug and his daughter. He was such a kind and gentle man with great stories to tell. In many ways it is such a pity that his work was ignored after the mother of all demos, and it has taken so long to focus on his ideas.<p>Instead we got a lot of tech bro billionaires building social networks that have poisoned discourse and destroyed democracies around the world.<p>That said, Doug and his foundation always gave me hope. I wish some of the VCs who blew all that money on wework and web3 would have looked in this direction.
At the early development stage of new technologies there is a lot of idealism and justified hope that the new and more powerful tools will decidedly improve the human condition.<p>Then life happens and things get derailed and sullied. The tech becomes a lever for (geo)political or economic interests and zero or even negative sum games. It evolves in bizzare and unforeseable ways that are quite disconnected from the initial foundational thinking.<p>Digital tech sixty years since Engelbart has failed in fundamental ways to deliver the goods. We can ignore the obvious dominance of surveillance capitalism that is decidedly the <i>opposite</i> of human augmentation (except for the few lining their pockets).<p>Even in pure bean counting economic terms there is no productivity benefit from all that tech [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-to-solve-the-puzzle-of-missing-productivity-growth/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-to-solve-the-puzzle...</a>