
A few words on Doug Engelbart (2013) - mpweiher
http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/
======
m_mueller
The failure to replicate Engelbart's vision of collaborative UI plagues me
every day. I have to think of it every day I'm forced to use Skype, Lotus
Notes, Excel and a bunch of different screen sharing services. Google Docs is
probably the closest we got, but I'm not allowed to use it for my work anymore
for now.

The fact that we have ubiquitous cameras, microphones, bandwidth, input
devices and compute power, but can't even achieve the level of integration
they had back in the 60s - it's just mindboggling.

~~~
grblovrflowerrr
[https://notion.so](https://notion.so) gets pretty close. They even cite
Engelbart's demo as a main inspiration.

~~~
jakelazaroff
They're also a sponsor of Dynamicland [1], Bret Victor and Alan Kay's attempt
to reinvent how humans interact with computers.

(I've been using Notion for the past few weeks and I love it)

[1] [https://dynamicland.org/](https://dynamicland.org/)

------
bouvin
I was fortunate enough to meet Doug Engelbart at a Hypertext conference years
ago, where he was a keynote speaker. Very friendly and soft spoken man. From
the his keynote, I got the distinct impression that he was disappointed and a
little saddened that we had not progressed further than we have. His vision of
augmenting the human intellect through the use of computers was both bold and
hopeful, but instead we are barraged by click-bait, fake news, trolls, and
social networking sites carefully engineered to keep us hooked—not much of an
augmentation.

~~~
walterbell
At least we know that negative augmentation (a) works, (b) is profitable. Now
we need to show the same for positive augmentation.

Apple could develop privacy-oriented augmentation demos for their AR glasses,
e.g. using local-only analysis of user data and preferences.

~~~
willvarfar
Should the recent focus on privacy be projected onto Doug Engelbart's aims on
positive augmentation?

Can you have positive augmentation without privacy? In the demos it brings to
my mind this idea where everyone's terminals are stitch-together as one
massive desktop, rather like a pen-and-paper office you can go around browsing
other people's desks.

And perhaps a lack of privacy helps in a corporate office environment?

ADD: it makes me wonder if my team couldn't have some kind of modern 'pc
anywhere' where you can connect to each other's desktops. So people don't feel
spied on you could have the camera feed of those who are currently sharing
your desktop just like in the demo shown in this obituary.

~~~
passthefist
While it's not the same, one of the best development setups I've worked with
was really low tech, literally ssh-ing into commodity pc's running our app in
a closet (production and staging were cloud hosted).

Because everyone was comfortable on the command like and connected via tmux
sessions, we could attach to that session from any computer we brought our
keys to.

We also had a couple pairing stations with one pc but two keyboard/mice and
monitors so each person could take turns driving. The upshot of the tmux thing
was that if we wanted to hop onto a pairing station it was as simple as taking
a usb stick with your keys and then attaching to the tmux session you had at
your desk.

Same went for interviews, we'd just have a candidate attach to a tmux session
and we had an interactive collaborative editor.

There's some pretty obvious problems with this, but I think it's relevant
since our setup used standard unix utils to achieve a modern 'pc anywhere'
type setup, and if there's one thing I'll always think about when it comes to
Doug Engelbart is how many of our new and shiny tools aren't really as new as
we think. He really had it down with The Mother of All Demos way back in '68.

------
javajosh
There is always this tension between idealism and realism within engineering.
Victor descries the ignorance we show the idealism of Engelbart, and
Englebart, in turn, expressed "sadness" at how little progress we've made.

And yet, consider someone else Victor considers a hero, Seymour Papert,
inventor of the Logo programming language. When we learned it on the Apple
IIe, it was without connectivity to any other device, and usually with just
the manual to guide us.

Collaboration was happening, but on a much longer time-scale. It wasn't
milliseconds, but rather months and years. It wasn't mediated by network
packets, but by shrink-wrapped software boxes and expansion cards purchased at
big-box retailers. A remarkable amount of progress happened on that slow,
physical time-scale, but much of it was _incompatible_ with shorter time-
scales and global messaging. For example, Windows, having grown up in the slow
time-scale, was hit hard by the fast time-scale, it's immune system non-
existent.

It's too easy to wave away the problems we really experienced (and experience)
with malware. Englebart made simplifying assumptions that people _wanted_ to
collaborate, and were _not malicious_ and did _not want to harm_ each other.
But these assumptions are all false, and a large, possibly majority proportion
of modern engineering effort directly and indirectly addresses these
unfortunate realities.

~~~
ThomPete
Very well said.

Also just think about the open source community and how much of that is built
collaboratively. Not by sharing a screen but by sharing a repository and
developing ways to work on the same project.

The _intent_ of Engelbart I still have been fully realized just in different
ways.

------
icc97
This is a pretty fascinating set of videos from the 1995 Vannevar Bush
Syposium [0]. Vannevar Bush's atlantic article [1] was one of the main
inspirations of Engelbart.

It has Douglas Engelbart talking about 'The Strategic Pursuit of Collective
IQ' and collective IQ seems like a good description for what Bret Victor was
trying to talk about as one of Engelbart's goals.

However it also has presentations from Tim Berners-Lee and Alan Kay amongst
others. It's at a cross over between the world that Engelbart and Kay imagined
and what the internet and the web became as we know it now.

[0]: [http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-
symposium....](http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-
symposium.html)

[1]: [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-
we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-
think/303881/)

------
camillomiller
Nice piece, but let me defend the headlines. Did Engelbart envision the
computer mouse? Yes. Is he highly regarded as a public personality for that?
Yes.

Hoping that a headline could convey the complexity you need an entire section
of a blog post to explain in a complex way is never a good critique of
journalism.

For that you need to run a special feature, or you promote a book. You can't
expect the New York Times to illustrate the true nature of Doug Engelbart on
the first three lines of his obituary.

Same applies for every scientist or "big mind" kind of person.

~~~
zeth___
Engelbart did not envision the brain dead point and click thing apple
introduced (with a single button[0]), or microsoft slightly improved version
(with two buttons[1]) and that we have made ever so slightly better since then
[2] [3] [4].

What he envisioned was a 32 state machine (or 256 if you count all the non-
keyboard buttons) which could be positioned anywhere on a screen:

[https://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2014/12/1450065_1...](https://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2014/12/1450065_10154835434955223_600605115474172169_n1.jpg)

Something that would cause you to switch modes completely between typing and
using it. A modal input mode for the gui, in the same way that vi is for the
keyboard.

The closest thing today is the razer keypad for gaming [5], and even that is
not integrated into the OS a tenth as well as what Engelbart had and by
default barely supports chording.

[0] [http://dynamis.no/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1984-Apple-
Maci...](http://dynamis.no/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1984-Apple-Macintosh-
Mouse.jpg)

[1]
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Mi...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Microsoft_Serial_Mouse_2.0A-8521.jpg/1280px-
Microsoft_Serial_Mouse_2.0A-8521.jpg)

[2] [https://www.technologyuk.net/computing/computer-
systems/imag...](https://www.technologyuk.net/computing/computer-
systems/images/mouse08.jpg)

[3] [https://files.pccasegear.com/images/1459844620-RZ-NAGA-
CHROM...](https://files.pccasegear.com/images/1459844620-RZ-NAGA-CHROMA-
th.jpg)

[4]
[https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2009/11/oomouse...](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2009/11/oomouse-
proto.jpg)

[5] [https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/I/817GlmVDffL...](https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/I/817GlmVDffL._SX425_.jpg)

~~~
schpaencoder
Well, are’nt you missing the point here? Conflating features with intent?

~~~
zeth___
No.

The mouse introduced in 1984 was philosophically incompatible with Anglebarts
mouse like device. Watch the mother of all demos and see the difference.

Apple:
[https://youtu.be/S7AL7tkQ7d0?t=13m8s](https://youtu.be/S7AL7tkQ7d0?t=13m8s)

Mother of all demos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

------
chvid
I agree that modern products are far away from the original vision of
collaborative hypermedia. But it is important to remember that these are
research prototypes and not popular commercial products; in that way they lack
the finish and the real-life validation a commercially succesful product has.

Why has collaborative authoring not been taken further? As far as I can tell
it is not for the lack of trying.

Maybe the vision of two people working simultaneously on the same document is
wrong? In the way that is not actually what people do; rather if you do
something together the natural process is splitting it up and delegating.

~~~
ThJ
I'm on a team of 4 people working on a giant accounting spreadsheet
simultaneously. It wouldn't be possible without collaborative editing.
Previously, the same team has worked on white papers simultaneously. In
theory, we could've done that by merging documents near the end, but we were
adding, dropping and moving sections while writing everything, so the end
result wouldn't have been the same.

There are other areas where I sorely miss collaborative editing. I want every
piece of application software to support it. I hate transferring files. I love
sharing live documents. My problem is that few people outside of this team I'm
talking about seem to understand how powerful collaborative real-time editing
can be. People of all ages are still emailing me Word documents like it's
1997. My head is in the future, the world is living in the past.

Same goes for smartphone usage, really. Try sending calendar invites to
someone who's barely aware of the calendar on his phone because he only uses
it for Instagram and calling his mates. Technologies to augment the human
intellect are all around us, but most of us are really bad at using them.

~~~
chvid
Just to clarify; I am not saying that there isn't a use case. I am just
questioning whether it is the general case that products should designed
around and maybe that is the reason why we don't see more of it.

If you have 4 people writing a book together would you really sit there in
realtime with 4 cursors and typing away on the same document? Or would you
structure, delegate and spread things out across time and space (doing most of
the work) and then later edit and merge it together.

~~~
vidarh
I work in a team of 15 people where our last offsite was planned mostly on a
single Google Docs document where we all edited sections, marked checklists,
added comments at the same time. The other day I was in our company flat that
doubles as occasional office, and three people in the flat and one remote all
edited the same document at the same time. This is business as usual for us.

We'd still structure, delegate and spread things out across time and space,
but why should we need to do it in separate documents? It adds effort to copy
and merge things and shift things around. Sometimes one person writes a part
and passes it off to another person (or three) to proofread and edit, and they
may move paragraphs around, or copy in paragraphs from another section.

------
jamesgeck0
> Our hypertext is not the same as Engelbart's hypertext, because it does not
> serve the same purpose.

Tim Banners-Lee is pretty upfront Engelbart's hypertext was a direct
inspiration [1]:

> I didn't invent the hypertext link either. The idea of jumping from one
> document to another had been thought about lots of people ...

> Doug Engelbart in the 1960's made a great system just like WWW except that
> it just ran on one [big] computer, as the internet hadn't been invented yet.
> Lots of hypertext systems had been made which just worked on one computer,
> and didn't link all the way across the world.

> I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS
> ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World Wide Web.

1\. [https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-
Lee/Kids.html](https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html)

------
rini17
I can't help but point finger toward academia - CS is concerned with
intersection of technology and math and the result is "applied" to users.
Augmentation of human intellect just won't fit into this paradigm.

~~~
j2kun
? "Human Computer Interaction" is a subfield of academic CS.

~~~
rini17
"Human Computer Interaction" != "Augmentation of Human Intellect"

~~~
j2kun
Your comment says that nothing in academic CS would allow for such a study.
Clearly HCI does. It has not yet achieved Engelbart's vision, and it might not
be trying to anyway, but it's clearly a framework that cares about how humans
can and should use machines, not simply math.

~~~
rini17
No, the comments don't say that. What I'm trying to say is: HCI has not yet
_recognized_ Engelbart's vision.

------
JoeSmithson
Is there a way to get all of Brett Victor's blog posts? One's like this don't
seem to be linked from his main page (unless I'm missing something obvious)

~~~
arunix
You can try a google search with:

    
    
      site:worrydream.com -vimeo -youtube

------
kencausey
Tangentially related: Squeak has long included a remote collaboration tool
called Nebraska
([http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1356](http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1356))
that, if I recall correctly, supported multiple mouse cursors (referred to as
'hands' in Morphic).

This of course may be due the original development of Squeak as a direct
descendant of Smalltalk-80 (via Apple) by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls among
others who were I'm sure more than familiar with the work of Doug Englelbart.

------
Angostura
"Ah, so like Google Wave"

~~~
schpaencoder
You know, I think google wave was so close to this augmenting human intellec
thing, perhaps the product was killed because it threatened to cannibalize
other segments of up and coming products from google, I have no idea.

But I clearly remember the feeling I had when discovering it.

~~~
edejong
It also didn’t really perform well at all.

~~~
jamesgeck0
This was the major barrier to use for me. Every new message in a thread made
performance a little bit worse. A thread with 100 messages in it was
distinctly laggy and unpleasant to use on my Core 2 Duo laptop.

------
madprops
There's something very organic about the system in his demo that feels almost
surreal

------
ipsum2
This is from 2013, if anyone else had a double take on "Doug Engelbart died
today".

~~~
a-saleh
I almost had. It actually really hit me. Even though it was 5 years ago.

------
jstewartmobile
Coming down from the mountain with the tablets to find a brand new golden calf
is not a new thing. And Engelbart, as good as he was, was still no Moses.

It's like, even if we had an actual implementation of his vision, what would
we do with it? Cure cancer? Or, would a bunch of corporate d-bags use it to
sell more opioids to people who don't need them? I'd put my money on the
latter.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
Not everything has to have an impact as grand as cure cancer to make peoples
day to day lives better.

~~~
jstewartmobile
That is not the point.

Augmenting human intelligence, while leaving the hearts as they are, is a
loss, not a gain.

~~~
pdfernhout
@jstewartmobile wrote: "Augmenting human intelligence, while leaving the
hearts as they are, is a loss, not a gain."

That is a brilliant insight that more intelligence may be a bad thing if your
heart is in the wrong place. Sorry to see your comment being downmodded and
greyed out. At the risk of the same happening to me, here is support for your
point on "heart".

Albert Einstein said in the 1940s: "The release of atom power has changed
everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in
the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

More by Einstein: [http://www.sacred-
texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm](http://www.sacred-
texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm) "But mere thinking cannot give us a sense
of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and
valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual,
seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to
perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the
authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified
merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as
powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments
of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its
being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into
being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of
powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to
sense their nature simply and clearly."

And Lewis Mumford said in the 1930s: "As a civilization, we have not yet
entered the neotechnic phase: we are still living between two worlds, one
dead, the other powerless to be born, in a cultural pseudomorph....
Paleotechnic purposes with neotechnic means, that is the most obvious
characteristic of the present order." (Technics and Civilization pp. 265-267)

Thus my own sig standing on the shoulders of giants: "The biggest challenge of
the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of
those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

I participated in Doug Engelbart's Unfinished Revolution II Colloquium run by
Stanford. I brought up some similar ideas there as well. Like in this email
thread I started: "[unrev-II] Is 'bootstrapping' part of the problem?"
[http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/216...](http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/2168.html)
"This is one reason why I think just stating the Bootstrap's Institute's (or
the colloquium's) goal of "bootstrapping" human or organizational ability as a
goal is not adequate. It has to be a question of bootstrapping towards what
end? There has to be an accompanying statement of human value."

I've continued to develop that theme elsewhere, like: "Recognizing irony is
key to transcending militarism (2010)" [http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-
irony-is-a-key-to-tran...](http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-
key-to-transcending-militarism.html) "The big problem is that all these new
war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of
abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by
people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based
political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to
create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so
far unappreciated by the mainstream."

The dangers of increasing intellect unmatched by increasing heart was also a
underlying theme in my book-length essay "Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading
between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health
Risks of Heart Disease (2008)" [http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-
lines.html](http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html)

A lengthy extract from there:

"""

Let's flip back to the beginning of PAW and try again to find a more
challenging article that explains PU mythology.

Perhaps the president's letter on page 2, "A Library for Scientists" will do.

PU President Shirley Tilghman describes a new library that will replace
several "isolated" departmental science libraries with one "scientific"
library. According to her letter, the new library "will symbolize the
increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the work in these fields on our
campus". The question is, where do you even begin to tell a university
president so obviously proud of her new library that making science and
engineering studies even more isolated from the humanities is the opposite of
what Princeton University needs to do to survive as an ethically viable
institution? And that splitting ethics from innovation was at the root cause
of a lot of evil in the world in the past? There is a lot of talk of
facilitating "interdisciplinary" work in her letter, but if you read between
the lines, you'll see that the implication is it will be between different
branches of science and engineering, not say, between biologists and
sociologists, or mechanical engineers and historians.

In case Professor Tilghman has not noticed, there is a picture on page 21 of
that same issue of PAW of a shark about to eat a Princetonian floating in
DeNunzio Pool [...] Maybe she had better look into that? It can't be good PR
under any circumstances, can it? I had not known PU's scientists had got that
far in their shark breeding experiments as they are sometimes hard to keep in
captivity (real scientists, not sharks. OK, that's just a joke, both are hard
to keep in captivity. :-) [...] Still, are those PU scientists and engineers
doing a good thing? Wouldn't it make it harder to recruit prospective talent
for the PU swim team? Or are the sharks in DeNunzio part of some new training
regime? Unless that is supposed to be a visiting Yalie about to get eaten?
That seems a little harsh, even by intercollegiate competitive standards. :-(

Still, maybe rather that "make the world a better place through advances in
scientific understanding", perhaps when you make an anti-social shark
"smarter" (with or without the laser beam :-), what do you have except a
bigger problem? :-(

For example from a review of "Deep Blue Sea": "So, in an effort to save their
funding, they want to take one really good go at making this...serum? I don't
remember, brain activating protein...stuff. So, they conduct their test on the
shark. And it WORKS! Yay! Congratulations all around! These guys f--ing rule!
And it's all parties and cupcakes until someone's arm gets eaten."

Also [from another review]: "Some scientists are out in the middle of the
ocean, trying to reproduce proteins in shark's brains. These proteins are the
cure for Alzheimer's, and one character even gives a half-assed speech about
how she's driven by memories of her father's mental illness. Well, to harvest
more protein, that scientist makes the shark's brains four times bigger than
normal and now the shark's are super-smart and eat all the scientists.
Hooray."

I'm sorry to say that the internet consensus on PU's smarter sharks is that
they are not a good idea. :-( Or maybe "Deep Blue Sea" was just a poorly made
horror film. :-)

"""

To be clear, I feel Doug's heart was in the right place -- even if he maybe
took that for granted in others.

~~~
aekotra
I disagree with nearly all of this post and its parent. It has much conflation
of ideas, but I will argue that this is the thrust:

"When bad actors are made more capable they are made more destructive,
therefore, no one should be made more capable."

This idea represents stagnation and fear of one's fellow man. We prevent
ourselves from improving our understanding because we worry someone will use
it against us. Today's society as an example, this is almost an inevitability!
The comments above focus _exclusively_ on the potential negatives. This is not
a useful way of conceptualizing the problem.

.

 _Albert Einstein said in the 1940s: "The release of atom power has changed
everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in
the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding
infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance._

These are examples of intellectual augmentation by collaboration of scientists
and engineers. However, the resulting destructive technology is made available
by the _concentration of material resources_ and therefore is wielded by a
select few in powerful positions. Note that the former cannot easily create
such technologies without the latter. Note that the former are nearly always
NOT the ones operating the technology!

 _PU President Shirley Tilghman describes a new library that will replace
several "isolated" departmental science libraries with one "scientific"
library.

Well, to harvest more protein, that scientist makes the shark's brains four
times bigger than normal and now the shark's are super-smart and eat all the
scientists._

These are simply good intentions and unintended consequences. In the example
of shark scientists, augmenting their intelligence by collaboration result in
them getting eaten. However, in both examples, a sufficiently augmented
intellect could have recognized and avoided the unintended consequences
altogether.

.

Critically: do not conflate the consequences of _acting on knowledge_ , with
intellect or the augmentation thereof.

The material results CAN be negative. The phenomenon of intellectual
augmentation itself is only of positive consequence: problems CAN be solved
more effectively. Problems can be solved poorly and have unintended
consequences but this is unrelated. The wrong problems can be solved and this
is also unrelated. The problems solved can be for the sole purpose of killing
and this is also unrelated.

The sentiment is that intellectual augmentation should be discouraged in
general because The Few that have the resources to produce destructive results
will be made that much more dangerous, by intent or by mistake. This is FEAR,
not certainty. The far more dire consequence is that your fellowman, who
wishes to collaborate and solve all sorts problems for the greater good and
otherwise, is DENIED the tools to facilitate his problem solving. And
subsequently, humanity is DENIED all the good that could arise from such a
scenario.

I don't intend to deny those who are pessimistic about the overall effect of
augmentation tools in the hands of present-day humanity, nor am I an optimist
on the subject. But to state confidently about net loss or gain to humanity
from such tools is FOLLY. I would say: make intellectual augmentation tools
and have them available to everyone. Not because bad things won't happen, but
because good things WILL happen. This is where the heart lies and where it
GROWS. And don't we agree it's _this_ that is lacking?

~~~
jstewartmobile
We apparently have two entirely different observations of reality. I will
share a little more of mine:

Kay and Papert did fantastic research on computing and education. Apple takes
the idea, and turns it into something that Kay describes as:

" _Think about this. How stupid is this? It’s about as stupid as you can get.
But how successful is the iPhone? It’s about as successful as you can get, so
that matches you up with something that is the logical equivalent of
television in our time._ "

and:

" _Yeah. We can eliminate the learning curve for reading by getting rid of
reading and going to recordings. That’s basically what they’re doing:
Basically, let’s revert back to a pre-tool time._ "

Or take the web. Berners-Lee. Smart guy, great intentions. Early days were
just plain text or the MS Frontpage goodness rocked by our professoriate. Not
pretty, but plenty of actual content that you could learn from. Contrast with
today where all of that stuff is buried several pages deep. What's link one?
Some bullshit content farm like WebMD full of popovers, dickbars, and ads for
pills nobody needs. Then there's the Facebook/Twitter awfulness, where
enumerating the breadth-and-depth of it would span several books.

Or television. Higher-minded early execs tried to use it as a tool for raising
the cultural bar--operas, great authors, polite debates. Those guys got their
clocks cleaned by the guy who put on " _Gilligan 's Island_," and that guy
would have had his clock cleaned by the assholes who made " _Survivor_ " and "
_The Apprentice_ ". How long before they just straight-up show porn on
broadcast? I do not know.

Or automobiles. Very practical inventions. What did we do with them? Urban
sprawl, 5-lane highways, white-flight, drunk driving, global warming, etc.
Many Europeans lucked-out by lacking either the cash or the empty space to
follow us in that particular mistake.

Obesity, opioids, mcmansions, etc. _pdfernhout_ nailed it on the scarcity
mindset in a post-scarcity world. There is a trajectory here. If you can show
me how I'm wrong about that trajectory, I would love to hear it just for the
sake of my own sanity.

I would also assert that _will_ and analytic brain power are entirely
different things. Take Kalanick. Obviously plenty of analytic intelligence.
Technology is like steroids for analytic intelligence. It let him become tech-
bro master of the universe instead of some two-bit engineer. It did not stop
him from becoming a total asshole.

~~~
aekotra
I agree and share the same sentiment about all your examples. And I would say
the trajectory will get worse before it gets better. In fact, I feel collapse
is _likely_.

But this is confusion of ideas once more. Your examples have everything to do
with the _relentless pursuit of money_. This is a separate problem, and is
directly related to _heart_ NOT intelligence. Collapse will come to all
degenerate societies _regardless_ of intellect and technological prowess.

~~~
jstewartmobile
My examples are ones of technological society _still_ making loaded 21st
century weapons while the typical mindset (for both geniuses and fools) had
already been baked-in thousands and thousands of years ago. Too much change,
too much power, entirely without baked-in evolutionary heuristics for dealing
with it.

