WRITTEN ON August 17th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Richard A lent me this book What the Dormouse Said which has got me deeper into checking out Doug Engelbart, whose 1960s Augment work gave IT a massive countercultural shove away from centralised, militaristic artificial intelligence and automation towards the mind-expanding new media creation so characteristic of the PCs and Internet we know and love.

And Engelbart is still on form in recent years

In a 1999 interview, Doug Engelbart told Government Technology Magazine, “But the real goal … was always the idea that our society really needed new ways for collective knowledge to work and that this goal was worth going after strategically, and not just as an accidental byproduct of things…

“You look out there and say the only ones who understand the technology are the people producing it. Yet all of them are pushing to get into the marketplace and to steer things with those products that they are inventing. But who is looking ahead to say what institutions and organizations, as end users, will actually need most? What configuration of capabilities in the technology, what operating systems, what environment and what evolutionary processes for changing the organization will be needed?”

We observe here a clear distinction between what Engelbart considers ideal organizations and the kind of real commercial enterprises and governments that prevail in our world. Executives of commercial enterprises are not known to be concerned with what end users actually need most. They are interested in what customers want most and, if need be, use advertising to stimulate a desire for their particular products and services. That is an entirely different kettle of fish. Similarly, democratically elected politicians seek to satisfy wishes more than needs. To them, this is very much a prerequisite for winning the next election.

The man who gave a multimedia demo with text editing, hyperlinks and a working mouse in 1968 (sic) reminds us that this tehnology serves a purpose, and how you develop it depends on what purpose you believe is the right one. And he believed in augmenting human knoweldge, creativity and effectiveness in contrast to the prevailing vision of automating jobs and replacing human thought with artificial intelligence.

Full video of Engelbart’s 1968 mother of all demos is here. It includes things we cant yet routinely do, like two mouse-driven cursors hovering over the same shared document with a videoconferencing window in one corner…and he’s doing that remotely with a lab 30 miles away via microwave link! Perhaps not surprising that Ken Kesey the very “Merry Prankster” himself described Engelbart’s NLS work as “the next big thing after acid”. * updated several times as I finally get to sit, awe-struck, through the whole presentation. This is beyond pertinent art; it’s indistinguishable from pertinent magic.