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.
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:
That video is the best one I know of if you want to hear him talk about his ideas.
What he wanted was to use computers to augment the intelligence of people, 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.
Getting to the point about computers being tools, Ursala has a wonderful breakdown of holistic vs control technologies, identifying which technologies are at the individual's disposal as an augmentative device, and which technologies merely contain & limit systems. Alas, even with so mucn "creative" software today, there s still a strong pretense of software that intermediates, that thinks it knows, and tries to hide & cloak the real intellectual truths inside of. Interface is often an Engelbartian dishonesty.
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.
Instead we got a lot of tech bro billionaires building social networks that have poisoned discourse and destroyed democracies around the world.
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.
>>Instead we got a lot of tech bro billionaires building social networks that have poisoned discourse and destroyed democracies around the world.
Social networks have provided people with a vast social graph that allows them to assess a vast number of people's credibility, interests, etc, which enables a whole slew of business and social relationships to exist that otherwise could not, everything from personalized cup-cake vendors, to children's school supplies vendors, to clubs for people interested in birdwatching.
All of these kinds of social connections are far easier to create when there's a ready social graph to tap into. But as usual, people take for granted what the prevailing technology provides, and focus only on the harm.
I can’t even fathom why any single human being out there would prefer personalised cupcake vendors over the vision Engelbart outlined, and that you seriously seem to consider this as a value proposition, instilled a deep sadness in me.
Everything social networks, and tech in general, have achieved so far, is driving people further away from each other.
Of course, they existed as categories, but they were able to grow much more using social media. It's much easier to expand such networks with a large-scale social network - that every one always taps into and builds their reputation on - in place.
I personally know numerous people whose business would not be viable without Facebook.
The main problem I see is folls taking their perfectly adequate webapp away. Lyft & Uber had years of working fine. They seem to go.i to & out of whether they force people into much worde less-privacy capable mobile apps.
This feels like a major silent majority issue, where a couple bad experiences & a couple very vocal folk have an outsized mindshare. People rarely bother trying to propose some counter arguments, to express it that overall their mobile web life is adequate, fine, or even good. The strongest emotions win out, dominate the conversation. And I for one find the evidence fleeting, but I expect that is going to be extremely unpopular with those sort of folks who like smashing the downvote button.
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.
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.
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 opposite of human augmentation (except for the few lining their pockets).
Even in pure bean counting economic terms there is no productivity benefit from all that tech [0]
We were filled with optimism, but I think that belied our ignorance. We had a massive increase in the complexity of our machines and we thought this could transfer to things like biology and deep-seated behaviors. Greed wasn't solved by technology and now we realize how technology can make greed even worse. We see that our biology is far more complex than was initially given credit for and there are no easy solutions for a great number of problems like cancer and aging.
Yet there is a fundamental paradox: detecting and de-faanging greedy behavior is something that technology can help with. Both at the educational level and the accounting, tracking and transparency level.
Greed doesnt feel intractable. The degree to which it is given free reign is a cultural parameter. Technology can certainly help reward the right behaviors and the that might be the best "augmentation" it could provide
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG3PWet8fDk&t=575
That video is the best one I know of if you want to hear him talk about his ideas.
What he wanted was to use computers to augment the intelligence of people, 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.
Getting to the point about computers being tools, Ursala has a wonderful breakdown of holistic vs control technologies, identifying which technologies are at the individual's disposal as an augmentative device, and which technologies merely contain & limit systems. Alas, even with so mucn "creative" software today, there s still a strong pretense of software that intermediates, that thinks it knows, and tries to hide & cloak the real intellectual truths inside of. Interface is often an Engelbartian dishonesty.
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.
Instead we got a lot of tech bro billionaires building social networks that have poisoned discourse and destroyed democracies around the world.
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.
Social networks have provided people with a vast social graph that allows them to assess a vast number of people's credibility, interests, etc, which enables a whole slew of business and social relationships to exist that otherwise could not, everything from personalized cup-cake vendors, to children's school supplies vendors, to clubs for people interested in birdwatching.
All of these kinds of social connections are far easier to create when there's a ready social graph to tap into. But as usual, people take for granted what the prevailing technology provides, and focus only on the harm.
Everything social networks, and tech in general, have achieved so far, is driving people further away from each other.
I personally know numerous people whose business would not be viable without Facebook.
The main problem I see is folls taking their perfectly adequate webapp away. Lyft & Uber had years of working fine. They seem to go.i to & out of whether they force people into much worde less-privacy capable mobile apps.
This feels like a major silent majority issue, where a couple bad experiences & a couple very vocal folk have an outsized mindshare. People rarely bother trying to propose some counter arguments, to express it that overall their mobile web life is adequate, fine, or even good. The strongest emotions win out, dominate the conversation. And I for one find the evidence fleeting, but I expect that is going to be extremely unpopular with those sort of folks who like smashing the downvote button.
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.
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 opposite of human augmentation (except for the few lining their pockets).
Even in pure bean counting economic terms there is no productivity benefit from all that tech [0]
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-to-solve-the-puzzle...
Greed doesnt feel intractable. The degree to which it is given free reign is a cultural parameter. Technology can certainly help reward the right behaviors and the that might be the best "augmentation" it could provide