Syndicated, Virginia Group

Accelerating Augmentation

For what one might call “Engelbart Week” at Open Learning ’17, I abridged Engelbart’s epic, and epochal, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” My thought was to make the reading more manageable, and to bring together resonant passages in a way that revealed some of the more subtle and nuanced textures of the 1962 framework. As often happens, my efforts to help present the material helped me attend to it more thoroughly as well. That, and a Twitter chat in which for the first time, courtesy of the mighty Mo Pelzel, I saw the lovely “whing-ding” part. (Thanks, Mo!)

I always have a lot to say about “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” I’ve blogged about it many times. I’ve mulled it over since 2004, when I first learned of it, and first encountered the name of Doug Engelbart. Rather than rehearse every bit of that, however, I want to share just a few thoughts. I hope they’re relevant to the larger goals of Open Learning ’17 and the Faculty Collaboratives initiative from which our cMOOC springs.

First: It’s interesting that Engelbart is not asking us to consider augmenting human intellect. Instead, he’s asking us to think about the way we as a species have always sought to augment our intellects–with language, with math, with engineering, with symbols generally–and consider his conceptual framework as a research opportunity for studying how we might accelerate the augmentation of our intellects. In this way he’s very aligned with Vannevar Bush. Rather than focusing on the means of augmentation–associative trails. shareable archives, and multiple modalities, etc.–Engelbart focuses on the nature of augmentation itself, what he calls Humans using Language, Artifacts, and Methodologies in which they are Trained (H-LAM/T). He also recognizes that language, artifacts, methodologies, and training will change the humans, who in turn will find ways to change language, artifacts, methodologies, and the process of training itself.

I’m not a big fan of the word “training,” but I take Engelbart’s point. There is an interesting process at work in this suite of human-tool interactions. Engelbart refers to that process as co-evolution. The research project he proposes is to study whether, and in what ways, that co-evolution might be accelerated. Without that research, he argues, we risk being at the mercy of our own ingenuity, forever inventing problems faster than we can solve them. Augmenting human intellect is what our intellects strive to do. The question is whether we will do that intellectual augmentation well, to good purposes, and create solutions faster than we create problems.

Second: purposeful, beneficial co-evolution will require much improved LAM/T affordances for communication and collaboration. Vannevar Bush’s magic desk, the Memex, becomes a visual display, backed up by computers available to individual knowledge workers, that permits and encourages complex symbol exchange as well as flexible storage, retrieval, and sharing capabilities.

Third, and this is something that became newly vivid for me this time, a system that permits and encourages complex symbol exchange as well as flexible storage, retrieval, and sharing capabilities will almost inevitably lead to newly complex symbols and symbol manipulation processes. Mo has blogged very insightfully about this facet of Engelbart’s imagination. What I’d add is two more points. One, that these co-evolutionary processes need to be considered within Engelbart’s conceptual framework in an ongoing manner–as John Seely Brown puts it, the interactions of increasingly complex systems become hyperexponential. (“No top to the ‘S-curve’.”) The other is that even as modes of comprehension increase for some, modes of incomprehension increase for others. The person who sits with “Joe” as Joe demonstrates his new symbol-manipulating capacities reacts in ways that many of us may recognize, either in ourselves or, when we have some inkling of Engelbart’s vision, in those who watch us do the work in open learning that we believe will accelerate the augmentation of human intellect in formal schooling:

[Joe] suggests that you sit and watch him for a while as he pursues some typical work, after which he will do some explaining. You are not particularly flattered by this, since you know that he is just going to be exercising new language and methodology developments on his new artifacts–and after all, the artifacts don’t look a bit different from what you expected–so why should he keep you sitting there as if you were a complete stranger to this stuff? It will just be a matter of “having the computer do some of his symbol-manipulating processes for him so that he can use more powerful concepts and concept-manipulation techniques,” as you have so often been told….3b3b

Lacking some essential humility, Joe’s colleague decides Joe is “just” going to do a little something more with regard to work and contexts Joe’s colleague is already quite familiar with. That word “just” comes up twice. It signals the way in which learning can be exceptionally difficult for many highly trained knowledge workers–not as a result of learning, necessarily, but as a result of the culture within which that learning has occurred. Namely, school.

Then you realized that you couldn’t make any sense at all out of the specific things he was doing, nor of the major part of what you saw on the displays. You could recognize many words, but there were a good number that were obviously special abbreviations of some sort. During the times when a given image or portion of an image remained unchanged long enough for you to study it a bit, you rarely saw anything that looked like a sentence as you were used to seeing one. You were beginning to gather that there were other symbols mixed with the words that might be part of a sentence, and that the different parts of what made a full-thought statement (your feeling about what a sentence is) were not just laid out end to end as you expected. But Joe suddenly cleared the displays and turned to you with a grin that signalled the end of the passive observation period, and also that somehow told you that he knew very well that you now knew that you had needed such a period to shake out some of your limited images and to really realize that a “capability hierarchy” was a rich and vital thing.3b3f

Given the exuberance and even the playfulness with which Engelbart shares his vision, I am confident Joe’s grin was friendly, even empathetic. But it probably didn’t feel that way to Joe’s colleague, whose sense of self-worth was bound up in a strong sense of self-sufficiency that doubtless made it even harder to follow Joe than it might otherwise have been.

“I guess you noticed that I was using unfamiliar notions, symbols, and processes to go about doing things that were even more unfamiliar to you?” You made a non-committal nod–you saw no reason to admit to him that you hadn’t even been able to tell which of the things he had been doing were to cooperate with which other things–and he continued. “To give you a feel for what goes on, I’m going to start discussing and demonstrating some of the very basic operations and notions I’ve been using. You’ve read the stuff about process and process-capability hierarchies, I’m sure. I know from past experience in explaining radical augmentation systems to people that the new and powerful higher-level capabilities that they are interested in–because basically those are what we are all anxious to improve–can’t really be explained to them without first giving them some understanding of the new and powerful capabilities upon which they are built.

This is a crucial moment in Joe’s explanation, underscoring Engelbart’s fundamental insistence on establishing a robust conceptual framework available for considering every single part of the “capability hierarchies.” As Joe will go on to argue, it’s no good tinkering with improvements at a higher level if one cannot understand and conceptualize every other level as well. (Which of course can make it difficult to distinguish “higher” and “lower” levels–as it should, confusing as that may seem.)

This holds true right on down the line to the type of low-level capability that is new and different to them all right, but that they just wouldn’t ordinarily see as being ‘powerful.’ And yet our systems wouldn’t be anywhere near as powerful without them, and a person’s comprehension of the system would be rather shallow if he didn’t have some understanding of these basic capabilities and of the hierarchical structure built up from them to provide the highest-level capabilities.”

I take it that Joe’s point, and Engelbart’s, is that we should be humble enough to recognize that a reconceptualization of much that we take for granted as a “low-level capability” will probably be necessary before we can have the depth of comprehension we need to pursue co-evolution and collective IQ (of all types!) in beneficial ways.

It takes humility, and hospitality, to spend time with new ideas, to try them on our pulses, to go deep and go long with concepts that ask us to re-examine many things we take for granted. There’s work to be done. No one has time for this kind of engagement. And what’s the incentive?

For Engelbart, the incentive was the chance to work toward the betterment of humankind by thinking about human ingenuity in a new framework, and with a new mind-like technology, the digital computer, that could accelerate both a) the research that discovered new knowledge and b) improvements in the knowledge-working environment that could c) devise ways to implement that knowledge and keep the process going in a beneficial direction.

It’s always seemed to me that this incentive is the very mission of education, particularly of higher education. Yet as many Open Learning ’17 participants pointed out in our Twitter chat last Friday, intellectual humility and hospitality can be hard to come by.

Engelbart said he never got over being naive. I take him at his word. But I also see that even in 1962, he knew all too well the cultural, intellectual, and professional barriers he would be likely to face. Certainly post-1962, Engelbart experienced several setbacks that would have stopped a lesser person. Yet in 2006, over forty years after he wrote “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” he was humble and hospitable enough to telephone an English professor at a small public liberal arts college in Virginia, just to return his call, and to talk, if only for a little while, about the long-distance thinking Doug Engelbart never abandoned.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Nelson: starting with the cover(s)

[Note: I’d love to include an image of the covers of Computer Lib/Dream Machines here, since they’re fascinating, and yes, images can aid understanding, especially when they represent the phenomenon under analysis.  But Nelson asserted copyright in his work, and that copyright still applies. I could probably use Wikipedia’s rationale for reproducing a low-resolution image.  But instead I’ll link to DigiBarn, which has some nice images of both the covers and some inside pages, scanned and posted with permission from Nelson. A google image search will turn up some additional (apparently unauthorized) images, including ones which show how the two covers connect, especially the intrusion of the superhero figure’s foot from the cover of Dream Machines onto the cover of Computer Lib]

In an attempt to feel a bit more caught up with the ongoing conversations in Open Learning 17, I decided to look ahead to the reading for week four (I like to think about things for a while before I write about them).  It looks like we’ll be reading excerpts (tba) of Theodor H. Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines, so I skimmed through the full(er?) version currently linked from the syllabus, trying to get a sense of the book(s) as a whole.  I found myself thinking about the information on the covers, including titles, subtitles, and illustrations.

The result, below, is some combination of a rhetorical analysis (courtesy of my current professional identity as a writing teacher), a gender analysis with particular attention to historical/cultural context and the book as an object (concerns common to my original fields of research/study), and the musings of someone who was just beginning to be culturally aware in 1974 (I was ten when the first edition of Computer Lib/Dream Machines came out).  There is also something of a trail, as I attempted to answer a research question using the affordances of the internet, a tool which, as we’ve noted, in many ways resembles the systems of knowledge-recording and building imagined by Bush, Engelbart, and Nelson himself.  So here’s the question, which came to me almost immediately on seeing the title, and the date of publication:

Why did Nelson choose Computer Lib as one of his titles? More specifically, what were the resonances of “lib” for him and his (possible/projected/ideal) reader(s)? 

My own immediate association, based on my somewhat-hazy memories of a 1974 spent living in the Northern Virginia suburbs, is with “women’s lib.”  Based on those associations, and on the androcentric perspective some of us have noted in our historical readings so far (Bush and Engelbart),  I was surprised.  Have we arrived at a reading which will display some awareness of, perhaps even sympathy for, contemporary gender struggles?  Or perhaps, thanks to age and/or location, I’m missing some other contemporary uses of “lib.”  How to answer this question?

I decided to look for other book titles from the early 1970s with “lib” in the title. This, as any librarian could have predicted, turned out to be a difficult search, since “lib” plays multiple roles, especially in databases of books: a part of many common words, an abbreviation for “book” or perhaps “volume,” and a part of the phrase “ad lib.” (which shows up in the titles of a good many music scores, among other things).  My attempts to search google books didn’t come out very well; I either came up with far too many results or far too few, with the “too few” identified as such in part by the fact that they didn’t include Nelson’s book.

WorldCat seemed to work better. Though I’m still not entirely confident of my results, it seems that most other books with the word “lib” in the title published in 1974 and indexed in WorldCat (eleven in all, that I could find) referred (positively or negatively) to the women’s liberation movement.  The two exceptions were closely related; there was one reference to “kids’ lib” and one to “gay lib” (a bit more skimming of results suggests that “gay” was the second-most-common word combined with “lib” in book titles in the early 1970s; looking back through 1970, I also found “city lib,” men’s lib,” and, most intriguingly, “mule lib,” which I didn’t explore further, lest the research trail become a rabbit trail; I do have student work to respond to today, which might explain some of my enthusiasm for this research digression).

So it seems that my memory/impression is correct: in 1974, “lib” was most often combined, in popular parlance, with “women’s.”  So why did Nelson choose to include it in one of his titles?  At least from my initial inspection, his work doesn’t seem to have an explicit gender focus, and one might even imagine that his primary imagined readers were men.    Were the cultural resonances of “lib” for him and/or his projected readers positive or attractive?  In my memory, “women’s lib” was more often than not a term of derision or dismissal, but, once again, cultural positions vary, and my memories stem from a particular time, place, and status.  Some authors who chose to include “women’s lib” in their titles clearly felt positively about the movement themselves, though some seem to have anticipated some resistance from some of their readers. Was Nelson simply looking for a shorthand term for “liberation,” and seized on one that was current in the culture, without considering its other associations?

I’m not sure of the answer, but I’ll be mulling this bit of cultural context, and its possible relevance (or not) as I take a closer look at what’s inside the book.

Similarly, I’ll be wondering about the fist: black power symbol?  anarchist symbol? general symbol of protest?

And the subtitle of Dream Machines.  The most likely referent for “minority report” seems to be a 1956 Philip K. Dick story (later made into a 2002 movie of the same name), but a quick google search on “minority report” plus each of the years between 1970 and 1974 revealed another reminder of the women’s liberation struggle: in 1972, a minority report played a role in the fight to seat more female delegates at the Democratic National Convention.

I should probably be wondering more about the superhero (Superman?) figure. For some reason, that’s the element that least engaged my attention, but it, too, certainly plays a role in constructing the immediate message of the book-as-artifact.  It seems possibly a bit at odds with the fist on the other cover (wasn’t Superman pretty establishment?), but maybe not?

Finally, I find myself wondering about the subtitle of Computer Lib, and what messages it sends to a possible/projected audience.  “You can and must understand computers NOW” is both encouraging/empowering (“can”) and prescriptivist (“must,” combined with the typographically shouted “NOW”). Some might find it inspiring, others offputting. Personally, I’m leery of gurus who not only assert that I must free myself, but also are eager to tell me exactly how to do it.  It’s a stance that seems both self-absorbed and lacking in self-awareness, and that does not inspire me with confidence that a self-appointed potential mentor has my best interests at heart, or is even much interested in me at all except as an object on which to project his own interpretations and ambitions.  In short, I don’t usually buy or read books with statements like that on the cover (except, perhaps, if I’m interested in them as historical artifacts).

A similar tension can haunt our attempts to be leaders in implementing open learning in formal teaching and learning contexts, especially for those of us who teach exclusively required classes.  Do students want their classes to be open, by whatever definition of open? If not, do we feel comfortable asserting that we know better than they do what’s best for them?  Perhaps we do, but we need to be aware that that’s what we’re doing, and of the potential contradictions involved in doing so.  Teachers have very real power in the classroom, and we can’t  give it up entirely, though many of us can to some extent choose how we use it to shape the teaching and learning contexts for which we’re responsible.

Based on Computer Lib‘s somewhat contradictory subtitle, I find myself wondering, again: to what sort of readers did Nelson think this message would appeal?  Or, alternatively, wasn’t he thinking that much about appealing to a potential audience?  This volume, at least in its external trappings, looks a bit like a manifesto, and manifestos, for all their explicit desire to persuade, are often devoted as much to expression — giving the author(s) a chance to work out ideas in writing, and to place them where others can see them — as on the sort of persuasive communication that tries to meet a reader where (s)he currently is.

The book (or at least some of Nelson’s key ideas — a somewhat separate thing) has clearly had lasting impact, or we wouldn’t be reading it.  So at some level, whatever its quirks and apparent contradictions, it succeeded.  At the same time, as we consider the idea of open education, and how and whether we promote it, and to whom, it may also be worth looking at Nelson’s covers as an example of an attempt to play the role of leader/mentor/teacher, and to ask ourselves which parts of his approach we might choose to emulate (or not), and why.

Open Participants, Syndicated

OL17: Open for Connections

IMG_0095 Buckminster Fuller recognized that “the answers to the problems of our world are all around us in the beautiful design of the universe…nature reveals to us the state of the art in design and technology, if we will look.”  This insight came almost 30 years after Vannevar Bush described, in great detail, his vision of a future “mechanized” world.  A world where our private libraries of books, records, and communications are stored on high-capacity microfilm, ready to recall, access, and connect.

 

Syndicated, Virginia Group

In Medias Res

I’ve been meaning to start a blog – a blog with this title, in fact – for several years now, but haven’t done it. Part of my hesitation stems from an awareness that a blog is a public space, part of my public online presence/persona.  That awareness both evokes a healthy (I think) caution, and brings out a bit of lingering perfectionism (an impulse that still rears its head at times, despite being mostly vanquished by fifty-plus years of life, including several decades of teaching a 4/4 writing-intensive load; continuing, however slowly, my own research and writing; and doing my best to keep up with an ever-evolving list of other interests and responsibilities).

I’ve also gotten caught up in weighing many of the usual questions faced by aspiring academic bloggers: whether some degree of anonymity/pseudonymity would be wise given my lack of tenure (and lack of eligibility for same); how to balance that caution with the desire to have a public voice; how much of the rest of my life, identity, and interests to include.

In the end (or at least for the moment), as my “about” page indicates, I’ve decided on including all the identities/perspectives (or at least all the ones that currently come to mind), and trusting to academic freedom for any protection I may need (perhaps an odd decision at what feels like a particularly perilous moment, but there’s also something to be said for living out the values in which one believes, and the peril – either from increased government intolerance of dissent or from the ongoing influence of forces driving the growth of academic precarity — does not, at least at the moment, feel personal).  I will also do my best to exercise some discretion in what I write about and how, balancing that with an impulse that goes back at least as far as the perfectionism – to describe things as I see them, even if that makes others, or me, uncomfortable.

The immediate precipitating cause for my finally starting the blog is a desire to participate in Open Learning 17, a cMOOC sponsored by Virginia’s Faculty Collaboratives Steering Committee (itself a part of a larger American Association of Colleges & Universities initiative).  Behind that, there’s desire to write about the English 302 Open Educational Resources (OER) project in which I’m involved (of which I will write more anon; for the moment, there’s a brief description on the “about” page).  Since I’m late getting started on the blogging portion of Open Ed 17, my blog posts are probably going to lag a week or more behind the reading schedule, or I may skip around a bit in the interests of participating as fully as possible in the conversation.

In the longer term, I expect this will also be a space to write about a variety of topics, including teaching and learning more generally;  using digital humanities techniques in the classroom (physical or virtual);  contingency in academia; and my ongoing research, mostly into abolitionist authors Emily Clemens Pearson and Harriet Jacobs, and my attempts to convey the results of that research via both traditional publication and digital humanities methods.

Beyond that, we’ll see: Biblical exegesis and/or theological reflection?  Political reflection ?(!?).  Pictures of flowers (or flooding) from my community garden plot?  Reflection on just why I find towpaths so alluring (but don’t visit the one a mile from my apartment nearly as often as I intend)? At the moment, all possibilities are open.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Writing an Open Text: Getting Started (Step One)

In a previous post, I tried to convince you to write an open text. Supposing you agree, here is my number one piece of advice to help you get started: Start writing.

Pick a topic/section/chapter that you’ll eventually want to cover – pick a favorite! – and start writing that portion of the text. I wrote two sections of a math book. An “equivalent amount”, depending on your discipline, should be enough to serve your purposes. And what, pray tell, are these purposes?

First off, they serve as play. You want to write, so do it! Don’t impose too much structure on yourself. Just have fun producing something. In the end, you’ll change much of what you just wrote. But you’ll develop skills you’ll need later (just like your play as a kid did). 

Secondly, this play will point out things you’ll need to develop in the future in a way that is more meaningful than anything I could write/advise. I wrote a math book and thought I knew how to make good graphs of functions. Then I made two. And realized how different they looked. And how horrible it would be if each graph in the text had its own look. My play introduced my need for graphical standards. (I could tell you to “develop graphical standards”, such as font sizes and color schemes. But your playtime will make clear what things need to be standardized.)

Finally, undertaking a big project is hard. By writing something – anything – you will have started. Keeping that momentum going is easier that starting it. If the first few weeks are spent trying to plan, after a few weeks you’ll likely be discouraged for you’ll have little to show for your work. Write something. Tell people you have a section already completed. Then step back and do the necessary planning. The next posts will cover some of those planning needs.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

Writing an Open Text: Getting Started (Step One)

In a previous post, I tried to convince you to write an open text. Supposing you agree, here is my number one piece of advice to help you get started: Start writing.

Pick a topic/section/chapter that you’ll eventually want to cover – pick a favorite! – and start writing that portion of the text. I wrote two sections of a math book. An “equivalent amount”, depending on your discipline, should be enough to serve your purposes. And what, pray tell, are these purposes?

First off, they serve as play. You want to write, so do it! Don’t impose too much structure on yourself. Just have fun producing something. In the end, you’ll change much of what you just wrote. But you’ll develop skills you’ll need later (just like your play as a kid did). 

Secondly, this play will point out things you’ll need to develop in the future in a way that is more meaningful than anything I could write/advise. I wrote a math book and thought I knew how to make good graphs of functions. Then I made two. And realized how different they looked. And how horrible it would be if each graph in the text had its own look. My play introduced my need for graphical standards. (I could tell you to “develop graphical standards”, such as font sizes and color schemes. But your playtime will make clear what things need to be standardized.)

Finally, undertaking a big project is hard. By writing something – anything – you will have started. Keeping that momentum going is easier that starting it. If the first few weeks are spent trying to plan, after a few weeks you’ll likely be discouraged for you’ll have little to show for your work. Write something. Tell people you have a section already completed. Then step back and do the necessary planning. The next posts will cover some of those planning needs.

Open Participants, Syndicated

The Collective

What really struck me when viewing videos of Douglas Englebart and reading parts of his essay ‘Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework’ so kindly excerpted for us by Gardener Campbell, was when he talked about the idea of a Collective IQ.

Beehive by Jeremy Price is licensed under CC by 2.0

As an invertebrate zoologist, when I think of a collective, a bee hive comes to mind. Individual bees are separate animals, but they function in a eusocial arrangement whereby the colony persists and grows as individuals do their different jobs of nursing, foraging and reproducing.  E.O. Wilson referred to eusocial insects like bees (and ants and other Hymenopterans) as a “superorganism”.    I don’t know if bee colonies offer us much in the way of a model for humans working together, but their abilities to communicate with each other puts humans to shame.   I especially loved it when Englebart said “Collectively, we can learn how to work collectively better”.  Because he both acknowledges that we don’t work so well collectively now, and that paradoxically, it is going to take a collective of us to figure out how to do it better! And so I think that much of the ‘augmentation’ of our ‘intellect’ is essentially about how we ‘put our heads together’, and how we use our technologies to basically learn how to work together more effectively.  But somewhere in those 1962 videos and writings of Engelbart’s, there is also the implication that we need to go beyond connecting our minds together to putting our hearts together as well. These days, I think we need to be very explicit about this. Perhaps Engelbart’s Collective IQ needs to incorporate other IQ’s, like social IQ and emotional IQ.   So what does a contemporary collective of intellectual, caring, human beings look like?  How do we integrate the power of working and learning in the Open to go about creating this? To me these seem like the important questions.   Engelbart says:  “The complexity of man’s [sic] problems are growing still faster and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity”.   And that was in 1962!  The urgency and complexity have only been intensified, and while our technologies are more sophisticated- we have not made any progress towards creating the kind of human compassionate collective that I think we will need to address things like  global climate change (and so much more).  Indeed things seem to have just gotten a lot worse.   I think a place to start is with an authentic practice of intersectionality (not just a recognition of diversity or inclusion).  What do you think?

Syndicated, Virginia Group

“….it really gets hard when you start believing in your dreams….” — Doug Engelbart

In the hope that anything worth posting once can be re-posted again (different audiences?), I’m offering this reflection / question I wrote for Gardner’s New Media Seminar a couple years ago .  Thoughts, anyone?

I’ve posted before about how central Doug Engelbart is to the Awakening of the Digital Imagination. This time I’m going to let an image — or more precisely, a mural — do the talking.  Created by Eileen Clegg and Valerie Landau for the fortieth anniversary of the Mother of All Demos, this graphic representation of the interaction between cultural change, technological innovation, and what Engelbart called “collective intelligence” suggests how we have co-evolved with our technology since the early twentieth century.  At the end of the mural, a blue wave asks us to think about “the next paradigm-shifting wave of innovation”….which seems to be happening in 2015.  I mean, RIGHT NOW.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

So I ask you, looking at the elements of the mural and the interactions and shifts it depicts — can we imagine and work for a future using technology and our collective intelligence to deal with the world’s “increasingly complex problems” in ethically responsible and constructive ways? Put another way, can we afford not to do this?

Open Participants, Syndicated

Augmented Intelligence: The True and Only AI

This week for #OpenLearning17 we’re reading excerpts from Doug Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” And here I am now, in reflecting upon this text, putting into practice the very “conceptual framework” that it so perspicaciously advanced more than half a century ago. We take it for granted today, this ability to display and manipulate and rearrange text and other symbols that represent our thought, in a networked environment that invites comment and annotation, that we forget how revolutionary these proposals were at the time. A time when computing was equated with calculation, and when speaking of AI could only mean a reference to “artificial intelligence,” not “augmented intelligence.”

So, to the text. For me, Englebart highlighted two crucial features of human intellect. First, our intellects operate largely upon external representations of meaning, that is, symbols: “texts, sketches, diagrams, lists, etc.” When ideas, concepts, and information can be displayed visually, we no longer have to hold those representations solely in our minds, which thus frees up our cognitive capacities for deeper-level thinking about the meanings inscribed therein. We have had such external representations and displays of interior thoughts since at least the time of the ancient cave paintings and, of course, the development of pictograms and writing. So there has already been “considerable” augmentation of human intellect for some time.

What Engelbart realized is that computational devices, such as the graphical interface and the mouse, could make possible the display of these symbolic representations of thought in a way that greatly facilitated our capacity to “manipulate” and “rearrange” them, thus stimulating our thinking and leading to possible new discoveries and insights. When texts, diagrams, charts, images, etc. are thus displayed, then “characteristically ‘human’ activities” can come to the fore, such as “playing with forms and relationships to ask what develops,” and “rearranging” texts and diagrams to discover new patterns and more intricate syntheses of what were previously perhaps disparate elements. Electronic representations of symbolic elements, as compared to print, afford a far more expeditious modification and rearrangement of elements. And it is that playful modification and rearrangement that can lead to new understandings and breakthroughs.

These ideas reinforcing the importance of the visual arrangement of data for the possibility of insight recalled for me some lessons that I learned many years ago from one of my philosophical mentors, Bernard Lonergan. In his work on cognitional theory, Lonergan, recovering elements from Aristotle and Aquinas, developed the notion of “insight into phantasm,” meaning that genuine intellectual discovery is a matter of apprehending an intelligible pattern or form in a presentation of sensible data (that is, data perceived by our senses or generated by our imagination). “Phantasm” here can be broadly understood as “image.” Lonergan often remarked on the importance of the diagram for inference and insight, with reference, for example, to the role of diagrams in mathematical discovery. [For a fuller (though difficult!) account, see Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, chapter 1, section 4.]

More generally then, the presentation and arrangement of symbolic data is crucial, and any given arrangement may be more or less conducive to discovery. That is why Engelbart’s observation about “playing” with and “rearranging” the materials we are dealing with strikes such a resonant chord. Even if we are only dealing with text, the ease of recombining and manipulating our words and phrases enables our writing to more quickly reach a suitable form of expression. And when we are dealing with multiple modalities of information, composing is even further facilitated by the digital tools that augment and amplify our native intellect. Gardner Campbell coined the lovely phrase “combinatorial disposition” to describe the penchant that one brings to materials in order to rearrange them in increasingly intricate patterns.

The second major takeaway is that, as we are social animals, our intellects work most effectively, not in isolation but in connection with others. When thoughts and ideas are externally represented, they thereby enter to some degree a public space, which creates the opportunity for the shared and collaborative rearrangement and manipulation of symbolic elements and the emergence of collective insight and intelligence. Engelbart refers to “team cooperation” in this essay and later uses the term “collective IQ.  So each person on a team can have simultaneous access to the same materials and “symbol structure,” and by working in “parallel independence” with one another, the team advances exponentially faster than could any single individual. The common space allows each person to contribute their own particular terminologies, intuitions, and hunches, while the interaction of these distinct perspectives spurs the refinement and precision of a more adequate set of explanatory concepts. This is made possible by the technical advancements of networked computers and hyperlinks, but again, the technological developments are only important insofar as they position the human intellect to more readily take advantage of its innately social and dialogical nature.

So now that title … the true and only AI. The notion of “artificial intelligence,” so much more prominent in recent awareness and discourse, was first proposed (or at least the term was coined) by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955, less than a decade before Engelbart’s groundbreaking essay. Interestingly, McCarthy and his team were also active at Stanford during the same time period as Engelbart was, and I wonder if there was any interaction between them.

I have no expertise in this field, but I think it most unfortunate that “artificial intelligence” has enjoyed such prominence as compared to “augmented intelligence.” Now it depends upon how you define “intelligence,” of course, but on philosophical (and, ultimately, theological) grounds, I don’t think there is such as thing as “artificial intelligence.” Machines and systems might be said to be “intelligent” in that they are highly developed and programmed, even to the point of altering that program in response to external conditions. I agree with the philosopher John Searle, whose “Chinese Room Argument” refutes the idea that a machine could have a mind in exactly the same sense that humans do. While I can certainly appreciate the achievements and benefits of a machine such as IBM’s Watson, it does not, in my opinion, possess the “intelligence” of the sort that was necessary to create it in the first place.

With Engelbart, I contend that “augmented intelligence” is the true (and only) AI (an allusory nod there to cultural critic Christopher Lasch and his book, The True and Only Heaven). A focus on augmented intelligence can push us to identify what is truly distinctive about human intelligence even as we benefit from the increasingly complex tools which that intelligence has fashioned. Many examples of the amplification of human intelligence by digital tools can be found in Clive Thompson‘s 2014 book, Smarter Than You Think. How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. As a chess player myself, I was particularly taken with chapter one, “The Rise of the Centaurs,” which describes the rise of computerized chess programs and its effect upon the game. The pivotal moment came in 1997, when then world champion Garry Kasparov was defeated in a match by IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. Thompson goes on to explain that in the last two decades, a “new form of chess intelligence” has emerged, in which the strongest players are not grandmasters themselves nor machines themselves, but human/machine teams. As Kasparov noted, “Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer is overwhelming.” [Chess engines today have gone far beyond even what Deep Blue accomplished, and you can freely (as in beer) access some of them, such as Stockfish (open source), right in your browser.]

Thompson concludes, generalizing from the chess experience: “We’re all playing advanced chess these days. We just haven’t learned to appreciate it.” So I guess that means we are all centaurs as well?

The network is the deliverable