Tonight I went to Doug Engelbart’s presentation dubbed “Raising the Collective IQ,” sponsored by Future Salon. I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect, but I was glad to report that Doug was both quite lucid and the topic matter fairly interesting (if slightly vague towards the end).
The talk began with some insightful anecdotes recounting his early experiences that led him into his research, and then centered primarily on discussing capability infrastructure, mostly based on the last paper he published in 1992, Toward High-Performance Organizations:
A Strategic Role for Groupware.
There were definite insightful comments on scaling these kinds of infrastructure, and the points on human system and physiological “component capabilities” have definitely been foremost in my mind recently in thinking about hacking process and organizational issues, both in corporate organization (ahem) and in social software contexts (ahem).
Also, these points definitely strongly touch two books I’ve read and recently enjoyed: Jeff Hawkins’ On Intelligence, which is about describing human intelligence in a memory-prediction neurological model, and Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, Get Back in the Box, which has more than a few great a-ha moments.
Here’s a quote from one of Engelbart’s slides on capability infrastructure:
Consider that human capability (individual or collective) depends upon an integrated infrastructure of component capabilities.
That being said, the talk wasn’t all sunshine and roses. An implication of Engelbart’s talk was that the concepts he has been talking about, the Dynamic Knowledge Repository, and his CoDIAK/bootstrap model haven’t been implemented yet, and when one looks at the type of tools that are currently being developed and are obviously serving to augment collective intelligence, it seems to me that that’s not the case. Engelbart continues to talk about first steps and different models needed to implement DKRs and seems to dismiss things like the Wikipedia, and well, the Internet.
When you consider all the components that make up the modern online experience: search engines and the related portal tools, IM, social networks, community sites, forums, blogs, feed readers, etc, the amount of added mental bandwidth is pretty astounding. Sure, it’s loose and messy and a work in progress, but it seems to be exactly what Engelbart espouses. And like the command line of his AUGMENT system, yes it has a harsh learning curve, but when you master it, there’s a similarly proportionate payoff.
I’m not sure if this seeming blind spot is an artifact of a “worse is better” blindspot, or if its something else. Apparently, Engelbart has been using AUGMENT every day for the past 40 years. I’m sure in comparison, the response time and hypertext capabilities of the Web must be offputting, but again, worse is better prevails because it was one thing that AUGMENT wasn’t: open.
I didn’t get to ask this question, but seems ironic to me, especially in light of Engelbart’s praise early on in open source, that AUGMENT, even though in continuous use for the past 40 years has never been released or cloned. Can you imagine the improvements that could be made if AUGMENT had itself had adhered to the CoDIAK model and been collaboratively improved? Instead, we have the web, which did exactly that: a resource that has been incrementally and collaboratively developed over the past decade, and has turned into what is now the world’s largest information repository and communication tool.
Doug Engelbart is a visionary, his work and writing as far as 40 years back still has incredible relevance, his goals are laudable, and it was a real treat to hear him talk. I guess I’m just puzzled and a bit disappointed when he doesn’t see CoDIAK and NICs when they appear (at least to me) to be sitting right there. Maybe it’s one of those paridigmatic issues he talks about.