He more than did his job. But who is the Doug Engelbart of today?
Where are the people that can articulate an actually desirable digital future and rally everybody (including those exclusively focused on pecuniary matters) around a human-centric vision?
I don't think anyone gets funded to do this kind of out of the box research anymore. Companies expect immediate results and a strict following of agile processes. If you're not tightly iterating a granular week by week towards a very specific task they don't want you around.
I find the erights/Agoric crowds'/Mark S. Miller's ideas interesting and desirable. While they have a very market/techno-centric perspective, their vision puts secure decentralized cooperation at the forefront, an approach that gets easily overlooked in today's centralized internet.
It's a libertarian perspective promoting individual sovereignty and bottom-up emergent organisation. It highlights flaws in the (security) architectures of our currently popular operating systems and programming languages, which were not built around a network-centric model because they originated from the pre-internet age.
Their paradigm reifies access and resource rights as manageable capabilities, and so allows for new forms of (self-) supervision, control and cooperation. An extension of concepts found in the real (legal) world into the digital realm.
Many many other species use tools[0], but it does seem to me that there's a huge difference in the kinds of tools and kinds of uses. Taking it to the extreme, I'm a lot more concerned about us humans making the Earth inhospitable, than I am about the risk from parrots doing so.
I know that. Humans have made way more tools, and are endangering themselves (and other animals in the process; not all of them). It's not the first time a life form endangers itself and many others (see mass extinctions https://eos.org/articles/tiny-algae-may-have-prompted-a-mass...). So, I still don't get the novelty of all this, aside from the fact that we're aware of it and either denying it or doing almost nothing to change our behavior accordingly. But this is another topic...
The concept of augmenting the intellect - rather than replacing/displacing human labor —has been popping up a bit lately when people discuss/ponder the latest wave of “AI”.
I think the most impressive thing about this is; 1. he predicted 3D CAD design i.e. the architect designing the perspective of a building and then asking to see the interior (on 3ft (36") wide display aka 42" (diag) monitor, unheard of at that time!), 2. he predicted AI assisted work i.e. asking the computer to tabulate information, to predict if light would hit a certain window and at which time.. 3. (pg 13) he predicted GPT predictive text, where text is gathered from a corpus of old draft documents and used to generate a reaction to prompts, 4. page 25 mentions a 3D color display device, 5. page 26 he strapped a pencil to a brick and tried to write with it because he wanted to think about what other beings who had different muscle structures than ours might have had to contend with in order to write symbols, 5. page 28, the concept of storing an entire dictionary and other information in a handheld device with a small display that anyone can quickly look up information in less than 3 seconds on the go and how that would propel humanity forward, 6. page 35, the concept of quickly translating data from one form to another, e.g. tables, graphs, formulas.. which we currently take for granted in today's spreadsheet and word programs. 7. page 36, moving graphical windows of information around and switching between 3D perspective and 2D orthographic mode of the same image data. 8. page 37, the cutting, pasting and stretching of image data, 9. page 41, concurrency, 10. page 48 - 56, attributed to Vannevar Bush - voice recognition / digital dictation, scanning images into a machine, searching for content via words instead of numerically, word processing, swiping left/right, the computer in a desk with screens, remotely controlled PCs, storing and sharing of data via microfilms, the average person creating a wikipedia / internet to assemble and lookup of information, transmitting video/images wirelessly, tapping into the eletrical currents in the the brain for thought recognition and control of a machine. 11. page 64, self-modifying programs and page 67 magnetic floppy discs, page 68 graphs, a laser pointer, duckhunt gun, page 69, handwriting recognition
The rest of the document after this seems to lose the plot and focuses heavily on punching holes in cards, computer timesharing and trying to comprehend the best and cheapest ways of storing data.
I'm still reading the document I'm sure I'll find more interesting predictions. This is a pretty groundbreaking document considering the year it was written. But, of course, he invented the mouse (which is mentioned to be a "pointer" in this document btw, a few years before he actually invented it) so it makes sense he'd have this kind of foresight.
BTW, the idea for the computer mouse seems to have come about because he was trying to brainstorm "de-augmenting" humans as a mere thought experiment, e.g. what if things were harder not easier due to limitations that humans do not possess because we never had to deal with certain issues. And, how would we have evolved our interactions with the world instead given those limitations, e.g. writing. This is a potentially new and interesting way to think up new concepts and inventions that might be useful.
> The problem with saying that Engelbart "invented hypertext", or "invented video conferencing", is that you are attempting to make sense of the past using references to the present. [...] Almost any time you interpret the past as "the present, but cruder", you end up missing the point. But in the case of Engelbart, you miss the point in spectacular fashion. [...] If you truly want to understand NLS, you have to forget today. Forget everything you think you know about computers. Forget that you think you know what a computer is. Go back to 1962. And then read his intent.
In the paper he actually multiple times mentions that he's predicting what we will be using in the future. And, quite a few of his examples are along the lines of, "Imagine many decades in the future if we had XYZ." And, many of the things he's describing did not exist at the time.
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34657811 - Feb 2023 (22 comments)
Engelbart's 1962 Proposal: Critical HCI Thinking/inspiration [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28551615 - Sept 2021 (1 comment)
Augmenting Human Intellect (1962) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26208874 - Feb 2021 (42 comments)
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20418297 - July 2019 (18 comments)
Augmenting Human Intellect (1962) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11426724 - April 2016 (16 comments)
Augmenting Human Intellect (1962) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9938592 - July 2015 (5 comments)
Augmenting Human Intellect (1962) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8795256 - Dec 2014 (2 comments)
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (1962) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633322 - Feb 2012 (4 comments)