Look which long lost (1962) classic I have rediscovered on the
web:
http://www.liquidinformation.org/engelbart/full_62_paper_augm_hum_int.html
AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A
Conceptual Framework
By: D. C. Engelbart
Abstract
This is an initial summary report of a project taking a new and systematic approach to improvin the intellectual effectiveness of the individual human being. A detailed conceptual framework
explores the nature of the system composed
of the individual and the tools, concepts, and methods that match his
basic capabilities to his problems. One of the tools that shows the
greatest immediate promise is the computer, when it can be harnessed
for direct on-line assistance, integrated with new concepts and
methods.
Some more background:
"In his lab at the
Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a
small team of researchers, developed some of the cornerstones of
personal computing as we know it, including the mouse, the windowed
user interface, and hypertext. Today, all these technologies are well
known, even taken for granted, but the assumptions and motivations
behind their invention are not. [...]
Engelbart felt that the complexity of many of the world's problems was becoming overwhelming, and the time for solving these problems was becoming shorter and shorter. What was needed, he determined, was a system that would augment human intelligence, co-transforming or co-evolving both humans and the machines they use. He sought a systematic way to think and organize this coevolution in an effort to discover a path on which a radical technological improvement could lead to a radical improvement in how to make people work effectively. What was involved in Engelbart's project was not just the invention of a computerized system that would enable humans, acting together, to manage complexity, but the invention of a new kind of human, "the user." What he ultimately envisioned was a "bootstrapping" process by which those who actually invented the hardware and software of this new system would simultaneously reinvent the human in a new form."
--
Francis Heylighen
"Evolution, Complexity and Cognition" research group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
Francis Heylighen
"Evolution, Complexity and Cognition" research group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
