
Augmenting Human Intellect (1962) - seanmcdirmid
http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
======
awinter-py
One truism of AI research (and 'human augmentation' is fairly in the AI space)
is that the best brains have overestimated our ability to write useful rules.
In a sense our legal systems and national economies are large-scale structures
for organizing human effort into something greater. In the 50s people thought
white-collar bureaucracy was the crowning achievement of the 20th century
(read about White Collar by C Wright Mills).

Other than 'faster mail', it's not clear that any rule systems of the consumer
internet make people more efficient workers. No futurists predicted that
grindr & SMS would be the best our century had to offer re: automating human
resources.

Neural nets were certainly hampered until the 2000s by weaker CPUs, but I
wonder if part of the problem was the expectation and hope that humans would
be able to write useful rules. This is a very old illusion.

~~~
lazaroclapp
grindr & SMS?

Try: e-commerce and search engines. We are pretty good at getting used to
technology, to the point that we forget we ever had to search anything in
books and encyclopedias, or call a travel agent to book hotel reservations
halfway across the globe, or seek a distributor for a part we needed in the
yellow pages. Now, is not that I don't agree that the march towards automation
advances more slowly than predicted in a lot of areas, but we have definitely
come up with systems that improve significantly how things are produced and
distributed when compared to mid 20th century...

~~~
awinter-py
e-commerce is cool but not because we've invented smarter rules for it. amazon
isn't that different from sears 116 years ago; collab filtering is a
difference, but that's a stat algo, not something humans design. They also use
TLA+ for their distributed systems -- i.e. they're solving problems at the
limit of unassisted human understanding.

(TLA and CF are definitely solid examples of human augmentation; but that
doesn't mean e-commerce is. the merchant is being augmented, not the
customer).

grindr as a proxy for any service that says 'match me with an arbitrary person
with these characteristics at this place and time'. grindr was one of the
early successful ones. stackoverflow careers (or monster.com, god help us)
also belongs on this list.

and SMS as an alternative to making plans and sticking to them; remember when
you had to be on time and couldn't edit plans on the way?

~~~
Kadin
Taken individually, all the improvements might seem merely like changes in
degree -- Amazon is an improved Sears, Roebuck; Wikipedia is an online version
of Britannica, etc. -- but in the aggregate it creates a difference in kind.
By making things easier and faster, it becomes possible to _do_ more.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has done more -- and I don't necessarily
just mean work at my job, I mean hobbies and projects and artwork and things
that I want to do, completely disconnected from _needing_ to do them --
because it's a lot easier to find information, order things, talk to other
people, etc. Projects that would have just been too complex to get off the
ground a few decades ago, because they would have involved multiple library
trips and probably bunches of ILLs and perhaps correspondence with various
people, each letter having a significant roundtrip time, are the work of a few
nights of reading online, a couple of online orders, and a weekend.

It's not AI, but it's certainly an enhancement. I'm not sure that there are
any entirely new categories of things that people, as a group, can do that we
weren't able to do before computerization, but it's certainly possible for an
individual to do more, and a number of artificial limitations have basically
disappeared.

------
nefitty
So did we make any progress in the last 50 years? Is the Flynn effect
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect))
a natural side-effect of the increasing complexity of a society, or the result
of active work and research toward increasing society's intelligence? I'm very
fascinated by this area, as I'm sure many of you here on HN are as well.

~~~
visakanv
> a natural side-effect of the increasing complexity of a society, or the
> result of active work and research toward increasing society's intelligence?

I think the two are interrelated, and maybe one might be a function of the
other– that is, "society's intelligence" is a function of the operations we
can perform unconsciously. We are more intelligent than before because we
don't have to reinvent everything from scratch, we can build on what others
have learnt and discovered before us.

