Future of Coding - Augmenting Human Intellect by Doug Engelbart

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

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Welcome to the Future of Coding. Today on the podcast, Jimmy Miller and Ivan Rees are discussing Doug Engelbert's Augmenting Human Intellect. Join the community at futureofcoding.org jimmy tell us about exopunks yeah so i've been playing exopunks a friend of mine uh started playing i know it's an old quote-unquote old game you know 2018 or something like that at this point so i don't know why they started playing but uh they did and they're like you have to join so uh i can have somebody to like benchmark against how well i'm doing uh i joined and started playing and i didn't honestly i didn't think i was gonna be like that

into it because you know it's a programming game i've played programming games you know i usually have fun for like a day or two and then i quit but there's just something about i think a lot of it is that i have a friend playing it so it's not just me doing this by myself right it's a social activity even if indirectly and asynchronously but i've just been really enjoying it and it's really made me go okay what is it about Exapunks that I'm liking so much? Like, why do I feel so much better doing this coding, even though it has literally none of the features I would want out of a programming environment in real life? It gives me all the feelings I want to get out of programming, if that makes sense. Is this your first Zachtronics game?

I think so. If I have played it, I've played games that, I don't think that they were Zachtronics games. I played, you know, a few little programming kind of games and, you know, building machines or whatever, but I'm pretty sure none of them were Zachtronics. That's a useful context because Zachtronics tends to do this. This is like what they do. It's like make these programming games

where it's like, it doesn't have any of the features I would want, but it still feels unexpectedly good. Yeah, so for anyone who hasn't played, right? It's a very simple, like basic style programming language that you use to control some bots, right? It's like maybe basic maybe actually

more like assembly really yeah you have very limited instructions that you have uh not a whole lot of expressiveness and you're always limited on the number of uh of instructions you can do and kind of the goal is to like solve these little puzzles but also do it in the most efficient way possible. And I thought that like, you know, maybe I would just enjoy that micro-optimizing because I do enjoy things like that. But I think what really has made this so much more appealing to me and kind of giving me all these feelings is the social environment that I'm in. I know that whenever I finish one of these puzzles, I won't have like, ah, no, that's not the work we wanted you to be doing, or you didn't do this quite the way that we were thinking,

or the business has changed its mind, or, you know, I just know at the end I'm going to get the reward I'm looking for. But also that like I have a friend that I'm trying to compete against. I just think that there's something about the way the environment is set up and the social circumstances that make me love doing this for programming so much more than my day job. I think another big part of these Zachtronics games, for me, something that they nail that is very, very similar to what what you've just said is that all of the challenges are

designed and they're designed to be a known size and like to take a certain amount of time and to require a certain amount of ingenuity or to be based on ideas and awarenesses that you've developed in the previous puzzles. Like there's the hand of a designer weaving through all of these puzzles, putting them into a sequence. And I think that is completely different from programming in a, you know, a more realistic context where, at least for me doing a lot of programming by myself or with a couple of other people and solving big sort of unknown business

problems some of them are very easy and you can tell they're very easy going in but then other ones you don't really know how big of a problem it's going to be you might have a vague sense of it but it's only once you're deep into the weeds that you kind of realize that you have bitten off a whole awful lot and it's going to be very hard to do or you hit some corner case that you weren't expecting and it forces you to go back and say oh okay actually this whole approach isn't going to work we need to do something else and there's a little bit of that in these puzzles like there's a little bit of okay i think this is the solution that i'm going to employ and i'm going to start building it out and then i'm going to learn something more and have to you know redo my

design but it feels it feels much more bounded to me and that bounding i just i find that comfortable when i'm playing like i don't feel like i'm i don't fear that i'm going to end up wasting a lot of time whereas when i'm actually doing my work i have that fear a lot see i definitely see that i mean don't you know don't get me wrong these these games are very wonderfully designed in terms of you progression and teaching you. But the ones that I've enjoyed the most are the battles against my friend that are bounded in terms of the complexity

of the code I'm allowed to write and cycles that can run. But the thing that's so interesting about them is that I don't know if my strategy is going to work right like i actually do like that i had to rework my bot lots of times and that i ended up you know being a little uh nerd sniped and sitting and watching step by step everything my uh friends bot did so i could reverse engineer their program in a very tedious manner that definitely didn't take me you know like an hour of my my time to do uh just so i could find the optimal strategy that made me win

every single time rather than 95 percent of the time uh but i don't know like i think that you're right that there's something really nice about that like lack of rework but i feel like when i do have those moments of rework in in this game they don't feel like the work rework interesting like like because the work rework the problem is all those external factors yeah i only have so much time there's expectations of me from the business i know that people aren't going to understand why I'm doing this rework. And so I'm going to have to justify myself. And, you know, those sorts of things, I think, are the, at least for me, the things that make me hate that kind of rework. Yeah, or like somebody else is blocked on you or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. And so part of me, the reason I wanted to talk about this is I just think, I think this is interesting and maybe an unexplored area in this future of coding realm is, how can we change these social environments that we're in? And even if we get to the best programming environment, will programming still feel the way it does today if it with the same social environment right and i think that this is something as programmers we often want to do is just make tools that will solve social issues but more often than not that doesn't work yeah and i think a big problem there is often the reluctant begrudging realization that the problem is even social in nature where a lot of people will just naturally gravitate towards a technical solution without really thinking through that social dynamic and then only later realize oh there's actually social dynamics

here and then maybe i have to engage with them and then engaging with them is is not fun and frustrating and it invalidates the whole possibility of a technical solution and that's just that's a cycle i see play out again and again and so that's um i think it may be one context where that has led to some change in approach that i like is the idea of like design the documentation first or write the documentation first or i've even seen people do like write the marketing page first or just that kind of outside in design where you're starting not just like user focused but starting all the way from the perspective of you know i'm a person who's gonna

have to use this thing that doesn't exist yet and i'm gonna have to use it in anger and there's gonna be this this challenging circumstance. Like the user is drunk. That's another one of those. Imagining the worst possible circumstance where somebody will have to use your thing. And then designing so that experience is a good one. And then working from that imagined scenario back to, okay, what documentation is needed what interfaces are needed you know if there are error messages what should they say and then only after you've got a strong sense of that

starting to design okay what is the actual you know implementation of this thing so that it can support that kind of an experience i think that's a one way where i've seen a little bit of that kind of, you know, let's anticipate the social aspects, let's anticipate the context of use, and start from there. Like, that's one aspect of it. Yeah, I think that for me, you know, I do think that this paper actually is one kind of interesting approach to this problem. So I do think this is a good tie-in. But I also think that, I don't know, I've seen a very, one of the things I like about these old papers

is there does seem to be a little bit more attention to the social aspects and our social shared values that I feel like are very lacking in our current discussion. Agile in the business world has kind of reigned supreme as the set of principles that all developers are supposed to follow. And that's what I would love to see more of, is just kind of starting from values and principles

and then building the system from there to support those, rather than thinking of the system and then how do we make sure that users can work within it, right? Let's just go with our values and figure out where that design leads us. And not to keep playing the same greatest hits tune over and over again,

but a certain someone by the name of brett victor gave this great talk called inventing on principle and uh in which he outlined his own principles and then of course the debate was oh okay well it's it's not those principles that we should all follow it's not about artists having an immediate connection with their tools cough cough stop doing that everybody um but it is instead that you should find your own principles and what i found in reading this this this paper and i guess we haven't introduced it yet but today we read doug engelbart's augmenting human intellect from 62 is that when it was yeah got it right here yeah 62 october 62 um what i found interesting in reading this was that

like looking at it through that from from that perspective, I've got to stop saying through that lens. I sound like such a second-rate Haskeller saying through that lens. um this paper is entirely uh from like it's it's it's proposing a solution and a way of working in a in a in a a framework for designing these sorts of solutions and ways of working that are only by and of and for this sort of office worker business productivity engineer researcher project management kind of culture um and and view of the world and there wasn't in at least in my recollection of of all the things in here there there wasn't any even hint that there are other ways that people might use computers there wasn't any hint of you know using this for as a recipe book or using it to plan a garden or using it to figure out how to how to how to seat people around tables at a wedding or

you know how to plan a schedule for taking kids to soccer or any like any more kind of pedestrian sort of non-professional contexts of use and i'm i'm sure that that's equally you know a consequence of this being prepared for a business context. Like, like this is prepared. This, this is for the air force, right? Prepared for the director of information sciences,

air force office of scientific research, Washington 25 DC. So there's that to it. And there's that, you know, computer equipment is very expensive and I'm sure it wouldn't have been worth imagining that computers would soon be in everyone's pockets let alone in everyone's homes so it's it's the kind of thing where

well the paper is it's split into these you know several different sections and there's i guess we have to get into it one way or another yeah i would say i think i think we need to give the audience a little bit of uh if you're not reading this paper, if you haven't read this paper, just a little bit of flavor what this paper is, right? Like, so this is a paper, quote unquote, but it's like 130 pages. It is just massive, right? So when Ivan's like, I didn't see it in there, the reason he's saying that is like, yeah, there's a lot. It's 130 very inconsistent, and I don't mean inconsistent in a pejorative sense, but just like descriptively speaking, inconsistent pages. In that, like the first bulk of it is this sort of section two, it's called a conceptual framework. And it's this very dense, very technical description description of a framework and we'll get into a

framework for what in a minute but then section three examples and discussion is this long flowing sort of narrative describing somebody working with some imaginary system that might be created and it's not like and this is why i touch on brett vector and i i swear to you jimmy and audience i did not mean for us to start into this this was my way of getting back to exopunks but this thing this thing is so so big and long that it has its own gravity i guess its own gravity well kind of like the node modules folder. Section three is this example of what a system could look like that would satisfy the framework outlined in section two. And it's that, that's that Brett Victor thing going on. Section three is the, here's the concrete

example. Here's the demonstration of a system. Here's, you know, something for you to really hang your coat on and think about as a real thing but that's not the point the point is this framework that one could use to design such systems that that split right there is um uh is something that's going to come up i'm sure a lot as a theme through our discussion of this because there's a there's a real disconnect in in many ways between section two the the actual framework and then section three then the nice example of it and you even missed in the in section three a we get like yeah half of uh vannevar bush's uh

proposal from 1945 like just extensive quotes of as we may think of, as we may think, uh, yeah, as we may think we basically got two papers in one with that. I, I probably think we can save some of that discussion for, we'll cover that paper I'm sure at some point, but yeah, I would title a, so section three B, you know, it, it really reads like a very weird fanfic it's like someone imagining what computers will be like in the future written in the style of a fan fiction uh i i really just want to use certain quotes from it as my reactions every time you say something in my notes here you know i i'm only i'm making fun of the paper because i feel like I can. Yes, there's a lot of really good stuff in here.

There's also, in my notes, a section called cringe. And so that's mostly quotes from that section, right? Like, it's a little, it's a little, maybe, it's probably tongue in cheek, but it definitely feels a little silly at times. You found that third section to be cringy i found some of the writing in it to be cringy i hate read the second section i did not enjoy a single moment of it and i uh i by i guess by contrast really enjoyed the third section and so maybe if there is a lot of cringe in the third section i was just relieved to read something that

didn't make me want to you know didn't make me want to sigh deeply and then spend an hour on a podcast complaining about it. And maybe invalidating my credentials as somebody who actually is a, you know, is a good computer person on the Twitter because I didn't enjoy section two of augmenting human intellect. But I'll just use this moment to reply using section three. I nod, depressed, no defense. Yeah, okay, I remember that sentence. Yeah. Okay, like, you know, I have to say, I think that one of the things that i found a little hard to reconcile here is you know if i think a lot of people will know will have watched the mother

of all demos yes so this is what engelbart's most famous for this is 1968 so we're talking six years later and this is kind of the paper that's seen as the start of the research program that leads to the mother of all demos, where Engelbart shows all of modern computing in one demo. Yeah. I mean, it's an incredibly impressive demo. in both senses, to separate the demo from this paper, in that there are things in the demo that I don't think had made it into the thought process yet, right? Like, I think definitely six years is a lot of development. But also, the paper covers a lot of things that the demo didn't really touch on. On that one sentence i found this paper especially section three more compelling than that demo sure the demo is real it actually exists as a thing you can see

they built it and that is incredibly impressive but i found the vision in section three more compelling than the actual thing that they built in that demo interesting i i found that i find that really interesting because in the demo, they do show the mundane things that you were talking about lacking in this paper. A big part of it, I went back and watched the demo just to refresh. It's like, I'm making a shopping list.

Yes. Yeah. The ability to make a shopping list on a computer shouldn't be my benchmark for being impressed. It's more just that this this paper was very business focused and i guess i'll not use coded language i'll come out and say it the um the thing that i would love to see is i would have loved to have seen the section two of this paper duplicated in another paper and that other paper having a section three that was presenting a vision of such a system developed in an arts context or in some other context other than like

you know doing research business for the air force um and that's just once again that's my theme of saying hey when you have a conceptual framework or when you have a set of principles why is it always okay? And now the example is going to be, we're going to use that to do some, some mathematical modeling, or we're going to use that to do some, you know,

process hierarchies or whatever, like businessy kind of application, um, spreadsheets and, you know, actuary tables or whatever it is. Why not something more of the human spirit? But that's my hobby horse.

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on something like this and now back to the program. I think with this paper, I definitely can't. I organized my thoughts not at all based on the sequence that they appear. Just because there's too much going on. And too many different interconnections between all the parts. And I'm going to open the curtain a little bit. Jimmy said that's how he structured his thoughts is not in sequence um i don't have structured thoughts on this i have very scattered thoughts i have i have pages and pages of notes don't get me wrong i didn't wake up the morning

of the test and say okay let's uh let's start studying but i i i don't even know how to begin approaching this like it's just there's so much here. So this is, you know, augmenting human intellect. And so we need to define that. What does it mean to augment it? So by augmenting human intellect, we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex situation, to gain comprehension, to suit his particular needs, and derive solutions to problems.

So as in our last one, man, his, etc. 1960s. I didn't change it here, but you know. Yeah, and there were a couple of places in the paper where that sort of phrasing of like, oh, one can scarcely imagine what you'd get if you had, you know, so many good men in a room together. I'm paraphrasing, but it's very, it doesn't feel mean spirited. It just feels, you know, like a reflection of the world at the time in this kind of a context. So to approach a complex solution, to gain comprehension, and to derive solutions to problems.

So Engelbart here really wants to, he believes that the problems that we're tackling are growing in scale, that they're becoming harder and harder, and that we're going to need to augment humans using computers in order to be able to really deal with these big problems that we have today. And that was actually like his life mission. Like if we're talking kind of back to the Brett Victor thing, he, you know, if you look up anything about him, it's that he decided like, what do I want to do with my career? And it was, well, problems are increasing, and we need better

ways of doing them. That's what I'm going to devote my whole career to and that is what he focused on and i think that that also frames this like not talking about art because just saying there are problems and solutions is usually not the way that people conceptualize art right yeah yeah depending i mean but in in general no it's it's less about that and it's more about uh expression and reflection and almost like a learning process. And there's there's you can draw analogies between them. But yeah, the the way that you frame it tends to be a little bit different. And another thing on this, you know, making it his life's work that I found interesting in reading some other materials, just as background for this was he had already been working at this for a while before this was published which makes sense but it's just because this is the first landmark work in his

career at least as far as i'm aware just from you know being in the culture um i i had sort of been thinking of this as like an early maybe immature presentation that sort of the beginning stages of his career pursuing this and that the the mother of all demos was sort of the culmination of it or at least like the peak of the mountain but in fact if if my memory serves he had sort of settled on this this set of principles this feeling like it's important to try and help humanity grasp with this increasing scale of problems back in the early 1950s, and that it was later in that decade that he actually got his career to the point where he could start doing this kind of work in a devoted way in sort of, I think, 58 or so. I might have these years wrong um that this is actually several

years into his work researching this kind of augmentation yeah the the story that i had heard was that he was actually stationed in the philippines and went to a military library and read as we may think by benevar bush and that was like the spark that set off all of this but i might be might be misremembering that but i know it was bush uh bush's paper that set off this whole thought and then yeah he wanted to uh he got married and wanted to think about what his career would be and so he went to grad school to to hope that he could solve these problems and while i agree with you that this is definitely, he had been working on these problems,

I think this is the first, like, up until this point, he'd been doing a little bit more traditional computing work, right? He had worked a lot on hardware and had some patents in his name, and he kind of earned his reputation to be able to present this and start trying to get funding for it. And so I think it's important to see in this paper how he wants to augment human intellect and how he thinks that works because i think that coming from where we are in history looking back at the mother of demo

of all demos and looking at how things progressed um we might have a different perception of it you know i think coming into this i'd kind of assumed there was like a continuousness with like the mother all demos and like small talky park kind of stuff but i i do think the vision we see here is markedly different from that sort of of setup yeah totally and and that's that's where like i actually liked this vision a lot and i think that there's there's there are things in here that to me feel as yet unrealized whereas mother of all demos feels like it's been you know the the totality of that vision has not been achieved but the individual piecemeal aspects of it have all been reproduced in some form or another in spirit if not you know in kind whereas in this in this paper

there were a lot of things that i either didn't know that i wanted that i now want or things that i knew that i wanted that i I haven't seen in the world. Like there's a vision in here for a way of working with computers that feels very true to the spirit of the future of coding community and adjacent interests, but it's not something that we've seen yet in the world. Well, I think that's very exciting for me personally, that you feel that way, because I was worried that i would have to be the

one to feel that way and i definitely don't okay cool right like i do think a lot of this hasn't been achieved but i'm not sure if i would want it to be hmm yeah i well okay well that's a different question yeah do i want this because okay um uh a small spoiler is one of the one of the one aspect of section three's description of a hypothetical system that fills this framework god i'm starting to talk like him is it feels very similar to rdf and the semantic web and that idea of you know let's take all of our information and tag it and define relationships and, you know, associate it and we'll, we'll come up with a categorization scheme for the relationships and then schemes of those schemes. And just like that, that sort of, I don't know if calling it,

like being an architecture astronaut is a fair thing to say about this but it it has that feel and i um yeah so i don't know that that is what i would want either um but it's certainly something where like i i still feel the appeal of the semantic web and of rdf and i i felt that sort of similar appeal of that aspect of this at least where it would be nice if that were to exist. Yeah, I think for people to kind of get what you're talking about here, we need to kind of get some of his terminology out there, right? Because it's interesting. It's definitely not terminology that crossed over into what we talk about today, right? At least not in the ways he's using it, no.

We use the term process and we use the term symbol, but they're not the same necessarily as what he's using. They're similar, but not the same thing. Yeah. So if you want to give a a concise summary of of section two and and get all that out of the way i will take a short nap and then i'll be back for section three yeah it's gonna be interesting because uh definitely most of my notes come from section two um so i i'm glad that i figured honestly that we would uh we would kind of gravitate towards the different sections. Even if I don't agree with it, I like the kind of directness of section two,

and I knew you would like the vision of section three, right? The description and kind of letting your imagination run wild more than he gives there. But I think it's important to get his little, he's got this nice little, I'll say nice to be nice, HLAMT. H-L-A-M slash T. And this is Human Using Language Artifacts Methodology in Which He Is Trained. That is this, this is the system, the kind of thought that, that Engelbart thinks it's very important for us to consider when we're thinking about augmentation, because

he wants to say that we're not just augmenting people, we're, we're augmenting them in a certain situation. And that situation is that they already have a language, they have artifacts, you know, tools and things and methodology, and they are educated in all of these things right uh and and and i know that this is it honestly feels a little unneeded to me um but i think it once i like i i kind of read back through this a few times trying to get what he's getting at here and i think this is like very important to his understanding and idea of how augmentation is supposed to work and it's that i think this is where this really differs

from like lick lighter's vision right where lick was seemed much more about like let's get humans and computers in the same room doing the same things together. And Engelbart is really about let's tackle this whole problem very holistically and focus on every single one of the capabilities that we have. And he thinks that he's kind of given this exhaustive list here of the most important capabilities that we can tap into and only if we tap into all of them and our system takes advantage of all of them can we like make

that next step and actually augment humans to be able to handle these harder problems and just to give a little more flavor and and fill in a gap here um this this h-l-a-m-t which is written h-l-a-m-t so that's annoying uh um i might just call this helmet you know putting on your helmet um it's like you're you know i'm putting on my special my helmet of augmentation that is these artifacts language methodology and training without which i would be a neanderthal um these aren't just capabilities themselves these are categories into which you can put capabilities and this this looking at capabilities is a big part of the foundation upon which later ideas in this paper rest and those capabilities are meant to be decomposed into little sub capabilities and smaller sub capabilities and uh what's the one about uh

like great bugs have lesser bugs upon their backs to bite them and little bugs have lesser bugs and so on ad infinitum something like that um anyways that's that's how this this capability hierarchy works where thinking about like oh my finger pushing a button like you might think oh that's a pretty you know primitive foundational binary kind of uh interaction i've got my finger i've got a button the finger can push the button but that in engelbart's view was already a composition many many many layers up from the quote-unquote bottom and even things like the muscle in the finger is worth thinking of as a as a composite capability and that eventually it would decompose down into you know elements of physics and chemistry and that sort

of thing and and lower and lower still and he wanted that that whole depth of things to be considered because he almost constructs like a graph out of these capabilities where like muscle in finger might be a capability that is used by many many other capabilities composing it so it might be pushing a button it might be turning a wheel it might be holding a pen something like that all use the muscle in your finger capability and this this is an interesting thing like jimmy was kind of alluding to because it's very focused on what the human is bringing to this system this this system that we want to augment the human is already bringing a lot of existing capabilities composed of other capabilities and we need to really kind of frame that because something we're going to do is we're going to look at optimizing those capability hierarchies.

We're going to look at shifting them around. And we're going to especially look at if we introduce a change in this one part of the capability hierarchy, what are the effects that sort of ripple out through all of the other capabilities in the hierarchy you know if you if you made it so that um and i i don't have a good example of this maybe if you do jimmy just cut me off but like if you made somebody's you know finger muscle stronger it might change the kind of buttons you can push and if you can push different buttons that might change the you know the mechanisms that those buttons connect to. And there'd be these like sort of ripples of consequence throughout the hierarchy. Now, this isn't a computer example, but the finger one actually did bring to mind a particular example that I think actually does kind of illustrate his point. So like he says that

you can think of like finger strength as one capability, but like, you know, using your finger, but the, you know, dexterity by which you can move your finger the precision the strength you have are all things that are a product of your like your social situation your training etc um and so you know a simple example for me comes to mind of snapping right it's not something that people just automatically know to do right but it's also not something that takes an extensive amount of training you can usually teach a kid to snap fairly easily some pick it up easier than others uh but the reason this comes to mind is i had an orchestra teacher that he was a bass player

and so if you play the the bass your your thumb muscles actually get like really buff. And so he could snap to keep time over the whole entire orchestra, no matter how loud we were playing his snap went throughout the whole entire class. And like, I definitely could not snap that loud. Right. And like, so I know this is a very silly example,

but it is, you know, where he is now able to use this snapping ability that a lot of us have in a way that is very different from, you know, how the rest of us can use it because of his training, because of his practice, because of the position he was in of being a bass player instead of being a violinist, etc. And I think that Engelbart really does want to think about all of these situations. And he even says, and I have to quote this one, that there are, there's like these parameters for which we can like take advantage of these capabilities. So I'll quote here. So, for instance, some research situations might have to disallow changes that require extensive retraining or which require undignified behavior by the human. Other situations might admit changes requiring years of special training, very expensive equipment, or the use of special drugs. This wasn't really pertinent, but it's

right by the certain finger action, so I really had to i had to read that i need a i need a uh a special buzzer jimmy because you have just landed at page 30 which i warned you if we talk about page 30 there was a certain thing on page 30 and i didn't tell you what it was that no you did not if this came up i would launch into my favorite conspiracy theory. I assumed it was about drugs. Yes, it was about drugs. You win. All right.

So here's what we're going to do. Everybody, we're in the middle of the boring part of augmenting human intellect. I am here to help you. You're all going to go to headweb.com, H-E-D-W-E-B dot com, which is the homepage for the hedonistic imperative which is part of an organization called bltc you can find them at bltc.com stands for better living through chemistry which was a very popular sort of uh movement in the 1960s movement calls it a weird word it's like a cultural thing where you know mommy's little helpers are stimulants that uh you know our pharmaceutical companies are pumping out into the market to help people you know live better through chemistry and you can go to headweb.com

slash paradise.html to take a look at the list of websites that this organization owns uh this is the paradise engineering bltc websites uh last updated january 2022 i'm going to read some of these websites to you these are a list of i believe at one point it was 5 000 domains i'm going to read some of them biopsychiatry.com headweb.com cannabis-marijuana.com primates.com opioids.com amphetamines.com peyote.com utilitarianism.com animal-rights.com hoxley.net paradiseengineering.com giant-panda.com sloths.org modernafil.wiki nootropic.com wireheading.com veganism dot com koalas dot org emperor dash penguin dot com hashish dot net nichi dot com walruses dot org euro dash news dot com house dash sparrow dot com corpulence dot com phrenology dot com kemptown dot com new dash labor dot com meet as in m e a t dot org dot uk so the theme of this group

chimpanzees dot net is a mixture of abolitionist dot com paradise engineering and general dash anesthesia dot com transhumanism and biological augmentation super superhappiness.com, through illicit substances, binding-problem.com, reproductive-revolution.com, but they also own a whole bunch of domains, robot-lover.com, posthumanity.com, antispeciesm.com,

hydroxophostyl.com. Uh, and what you eventually get down into are ones that are all about animals or chocolate, very innocent seeming things. Cordates.com. You'll land on these pages and it will be like some picture of a monkey with a whole bunch of links on the page describing various things about the animal. And all of the pages will gradually funnel you towards a discussion of something about the monkey's brain chemistry or something like that.

Lovesickness.com. And they will all have at the bottom of the page this sort of triangular arrangement of links. And so you'll start on one of these pages and it will feel very innocuous and kind of interesting like, oh, cool, I'm learning about this one species of bird and it you will very quickly find yourself routed to like okay we need to shut down all of human pain and suffering and get everybody hooked up to machines so that we can pump them full of drugs so that we can reboot society in this like post-suffering existence and all embrace hedonism and that sort of thing pork.org.uk uh yeah this is this is my favorite because they had they had thousands and thousands and thousands of these websites octopuses.org so uh i i found that funny because such a weird subsection of the internet that i am happy i've

never stumbled upon accidentally i i now that i know that these websites exist i have stumbled on them accidentally now like i will randomly find myself on some website and i'll see the triangle of links at the bottom and go oh shit they got me um uh yeah so anyways yeah they're all about the abolition of pain through uh smart drugs and and uh chocolate and Emperor Penguins. So that's Better Living Through Chemistry, BLTC. So yeah, so certain augmentation systems might require the use of special drugs. Doug was 100% correct about that. Yeah, so I found that to be a very, I mean, I know it's the 60s in the military, and I know that this is stuff that's on the table uh for for

potentially you know augmenting humans so uh not super surprising that it would show up but it was just a very weird aside um and so you know there's this idea of this he has this like repertoire hierarchy that like as you make changes to one it opens up possibilities to the other, right? And so this is really him wanting to think systematically about the whole way, he ends up then funneling all of that into one particular vision of the most important thing that we can do to augment humans. And this took me a while to figure out what the point of it was, and this is why I was confused about Section 3. I didn't understand what points he was trying to pull out with section three. It just felt like a very weird narrative to me. But at least for me, once I understood this, this neo-warfian hypothesis, I really think this is the backbone of his whole work. And I'm happy to explain it. But I also want to hear your, since this is the boring section for

you, I want to hear your thoughts on this whole section here. Yeah, so my problem with this whole section could be best illustrated by maybe the following question. We'll see if this works. Jimmy, can you explain the difference to me between the capability hierarchy and the repertory hierarchy? No, I cannot. I think there is a distinction in his mind, but I did not dive into that. I'm sure I could find some quotes here that explain it. But yeah, I don't know it.

So that was my problem with this section, is it introduces so many terms to describe so many different kinds of things that are all arranged in so many different kinds of structures and they're all like maybe they're explained but they're explained in these very long run-on sentences that are full of six syllable words and it's just like doug's writing style is so technical and it's so i don't know bombastic is the right word i know that's one of those words where the real meaning of that word is different from the way everybody uses it. So I think this might be an appropriate usage of the word bombastic. But it's basically like his writing is just, it's puffed full of air. And it's long and, I don't know, I'm just reminded of people who write business correspondence when I read this. And I'm not reminded of somebody who is able to articulate a very compelling vision

in a very persuasive way using language. And I think that that's one of the reasons why Bush's, as we may think, being sort of imported into this paper. And my note for that page was literally import quote as we may think semicolon um okay i got i do have a quote here about how which i think illustrates the point you're trying to make um but also does tie up these different uh process capabilities and basic capabilities and into the repertoire. All right. So what happens then is that each individual develops a certain repertoire of process

capabilities from which he selects and adapts those that will compose the process that he executes. This repertoire is like a toolkit. And just as the mechanic must know what his tools can do and how to use them, so the intellectual worker must know the capabilities of his tools and the entire repertoire represents an internet hierarchical structure which we often call the repertoire hierarchy so i think this gives a good flavor of the sort of writing that we're talking about here it is very in my mind uh it's very like kind of scholastic like it really wants to draw these heart sharp distinctions and place everything into a hierarchy and kind of give you the whole view at once of everything you could

possibly organize comes into his system somehow or other i i don't know that i would call this academic because it's it has another aspect to it that i don't necessarily see in academic writing i mean i okay sure it's there too but it's it's this need to list everything out at length like there are many sentences in here where uh and he even starts poking fun at this towards the end of section three which maybe we'll get there but like this need to list out eight or nine examples of a thing or to to create all of these different kinds of structurings and relationships and anytime one of them comes up to contrast it against the other one like it's it's writing that is very context free so it's like every sentence needs to do a lot to assert where it sits in relation to the other ones.

Whereas I feel like good writing is a little bit more comfortable building up some context and then making good use of that context later on so that you don't need to keep repeating the same things over and over again and keep making the same references. You can kind of set some state and then work on that state. Whereas this to me feels like like it has that need for context but it doesn't use that context very effectively to be clear i was being a super nerd when i said scholastic and i was meaning like aristotelian uh tomistic uh like that that's that's the sort of sorry my uh my philosophy background's leaking out. So that's the sort of scholastic I meant was this like pre-Newtonian view of the world. And so much of it was putting animals into a hierarchy and thinking about how the whole world is in this hierarchical thing with humans as the best and that sort of – and a lot of it was making these lists.

And yeah, that was definitely not modern academia i was kind of uh yeah calling back to like an aristotelian uh scholasticism yeah so and i i do think there's actually lots of so i i while i i think that his writing's that way this neo-warfian hypothesis actually has a lot of historical precedence for what he's trying to do. He just has a new little flavor of it. So if you're not familiar, anyone listening to this warfian hypothesis, he defines it this way. The warfian hypothesis states that the worldview of a culture is limited by the structures of the language which that culture uses. So if you don't have a term for something, if your language doesn't have certain tenses,

you can't think these thoughts is the strong version of this Warfian hypothesis. That was very popular in the 60s. And Engelbart here wants to put together his own neo-Warfian hypothesis. He says that his new hypothesis is that both the language used by the culture and the capability for effective intellectual activity are directly affected during their evolution by the means by which the individuals control the external manipulation of symbols. Mouthful. Can you read that again, can you can you give me a nice clean take of that one yeah sorry um both the language this is staying in by the way both the language used by

a culture and the capability for effective intellectual activity are directly affected during their evolution by the means by which individuals control the external manipulation of symbols. I'm listening to this conversation at 1x speed because we're having it in real time. I normally listen to podcasts at like 1.5 or so. Even at 1x speed, I can't follow that sentence. Maybe I need like another cup of coffee but my goodness yeah so this is this is why it took me so long to like understand some of the things that he was doing in section three because i think this is really the crux for him and what section three

like kind of plays out uh in the little scenario has so what what he does i think that that sentence is definitely not clear but the idea here is that our our language is actually uh affected by our artifacts by our by our processes by the whole uh what was a helmet yeah yeah by all of helmet right um and so what he actually thinks is that his idea for augmenting human intelligence is to give us our next evolution in human capability. And so he says that there were three steps of human intellectual evolution, and we're on to the fourth one. So the first is this concept manipulation where we can think abstract thoughts in our head. The next is symbol manipulation where rather than having to look at all the sheep and be like, yeah, I think they're all here, we can have a number that represents it, like 27. And so this is like symbol manipulation. Then there's manual external symbol manipulation. So this is the next stage

in human intellectual evolution. And this will bring us into the point where we can do more than we ever were able to do before. And so I think section three, this is my view, section three is his whole taking this view of what would it look like if humans could do automated external symbol manipulation and he wants it the the people doing this to be so different that it's like going from no written language to written language it's the same level of change that we had there this is where he he starts using the idea of tying a brick to a pencil as a way of kind of justifying the like if it's hard to understand what it would feel like to go from having what we have today to some hypothetical future where we have this new level of augmentation let's take a a capability that we currently have and cripple it

in a way so that we can feel that difference more acutely and so he ties a brick to a pencil and then does a bunch of tests with writing to see kind of uh what that is like you know imagine if all of our pencils had bricks on them and we could suddenly take the bricks off and i think that's at least to me that was one of the the sort of the meme-ier things that i heard from this paper when people talk about it is the is the talk of a brick on a pencil yeah apparently this was if you were interviewing with engelbart you would know if you passed if he pulled out the brick ah interesting just that that that would be you know he gives you the brick or he gives you the brick pencil and says okay start writing we need more data or yeah he he gives you it and once you think if he thinks you've gotten it all right like you you're on board he wants to

just illustrate it so much more so it's like you're this is kind of your like induction into the community it's like all right here's the brick pencil try to write and like now you realize how much current technology is holding you back right um yeah and and he does think like this is where this like corded keyboard and everything in the mother of all demos comes from is he thinks that so much of our technology doesn't let us go at the speed that we could go at. And that speed alone makes a huge difference. And this is the brick is, you know, his example of that. And so if we could just be faster at getting our thoughts out, we could do, we could think different thoughts.

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You feel a sense of fulfillment. You feel a sense of purpose. You turn to the human next to you and say, I just got a job at Replit, and you should too. Go to Replit.com slash jobs. Now I'm back to the program. I think we should move on to section three, but I do want to just say how I see this section two,

the real vision here is this interactiveness with the computer, of course. It is about being able to use this automated means, be able to have nice visualizations. But I do see it even, I see this undercurrent that I think shows up over and over again in section three of we need to get beyond natural language engelbart really seems to have kind of this uh kind of starts with leibniz and then uh you know early 20th century you get like wittgenstein and karnap and you know that this kind of all flows into this computer science world i know karnap was the teacher of some of the early computer science people. I can't remember who, whoever invented neural nets. I know Carnap was his teacher. But there's this idea of like, we could get a scientifically precise language, that we could move beyond the ambiguities of

natural language and really have something that is rigorous and exact and and in a way that i think computers really lend themselves to and so this to me seems to be maybe not explicitly stated but really like underlying a lot of what engelbart imagines us being able to augment our intellect is making a new language that isn't even expressible without the computer and not just a new language like hey new um you know verbs and nouns and that sort of thing or new grammar rules or syntax rules but even like new structures into which ideas can be put which is i think like if you kind of decompose what the language is a little bit like and i mean for us programmers that's going to be a really familiar idea but just this

this way of communicating an idea and that the the natural spoken and written languages that we have are not well suited to rigorously encoding an idea yeah, and I think he wants to go even further to just say like, you know, with programming, I can write up programs on a chalkboard and, you know, you can understand them, right? They still follow kind of that same thing. I think he wants to even say like, if we develop this language of the future,

you would have to be like embedded in the system. You'd have to be working in the system to even begin to understand it. The understanding wouldn't necessarily be in your head, right? It would be the combination of you and the artifact that have the understanding. And this is why there's people in philosophy who believe in the extended mind thesis that really like Engelbart's work here. The space in which you work is as much a part of your mind as the brain that is in your body.

If you have a notebook or something like that, the things that are in your notebook are a part of your mind. And it's not just that it's a tool that you use to work through your thoughts, but that the thoughts themselves are in some sense um embodied by that thing so yeah with that i think uh i think section three i want you to introduce us into section three because this is not my not the focus that i put on this paper jimmy i would love to introduce you to section three section three begins with the best writing in this entire paper begins with writing that is substantially better than any of the other writing in this paper because it was not

written by doug engelbert who i realized i should have been calling dougie this entire time because i reading reading this paper i kept thinking you know doug doug is much more of a futurist in the traditional sense than we give him credit for like He has that kind of Buckminster Fuller sort of feeling to his writing and thinking. At least it reminded me of that. I kept thinking of Buckminster Fuller as I was reading this. What I heard from you is that if you're going to teach me how to work like Doug Engelbart, I can just ask you to teach me how to dougie yeah dougie who reminded me of licky and bucky um begins section three by importing bushes as we may think as we've discussed previously

at quite length so it's many pages of as we may think with as we've discussed previously, at quite length. So it's many pages of, as we may think, with then a little bit of commentary on it. And we won't go through, as we may think, here, because that will be something we go through on a future episode, I'm sure. The short version of it is that it introduces this idea of a special kind of desk that you sit at to do your work and it's called a memex just that's a name that bush just pulled out of thin air maybe um and it goes into quite a bit of detail describing the technology involved i'm not going to do that um that'll be entertaining when we get to it later but it's a desk that lets you basically scan documents into it and it will store those documents for you and be able to help you search through them and not like a google style search but like a traditional sort of like flipping through a book looking for the right page kind

of search that you have with physical paper where you're kind of relying on your own memory a lot but it will help you do that by flipping through the pages very quickly or at a speed of your choosing and it's just a way of being able to store and retrieve information and then also share that information with other people by making a copy um and then having you know layers of your own information that you can put on top and and uh kind of annotate and it's this very powerful vision considering it came from 1945 so it was before computers were you know even what they were in doug engelbart's time and it sort of set the stage for a lot of the early era of computer exploration and this serves as a little bit of a groundwork for the rest of this section where engelbart presents a hypothetical system that um implements the framework that he described in section two and this this hypothetical system is a desk that you sit at should sound familiar um and he he explains how the system

works with a narrative where somebody named joe and in my mind i was picturing joe armstrong the entire time uh creator of erlang um who's a delightfully sweet man who recently passed away um rest in peace joe uh and i imagine joe Joe Armstrong sitting at this desk that Engelbart describes and kind of teaching you, the reader who is to searching through information and pulling up relationships and viewing things in a kind of a schematic view or a network kind of view. And then the other screen that might be used for actually looking at a specific thing in a concrete form. Just one example of how you might use those two screens. And there were keyboard- things uh for either hand sort of spread out on the sides of the desk so i and i did not imagine joe armstrong standing there in a t pose the entire time but engelbart does explain that your hands are quite far apart

and that um sort of hanging down from above are these two kind of maybe articulating arms from the bottoms of which hang light pens and so as your hands are stretched out to the sides doing this keyboarding kind of stuff if you need to do some drawing on one of the screens that's in front of you you bring your hand over and grab one of those hanging pens as your hand comes and then you arrive at the screen in the middle you do your pen work and then you arrive at the screen in the middle you do your pen work and then you let go of the pen and it retracts back up to the hanging arm and then you can push your hand back out to the keyboard on either side so it's very much like this sort of drafting table like space where you're really stretching out across a surface and and working

with tools all around you which i love i think that that's awesome and i'm i constantly like well i don't like the the way that it's designed for a single person like it reminds me of those i'm sure you've seen this like these you know desk setups that are designed for like reclining on a on a bed like thing and then there there's these big metal arms that hang over you that you can VESA mount a monitor on, and then a tilted keyboard tray, and all these... It's kind of like if you took one of those giant VESA mount things with all the arms coming off of it,

but put some tables and stuff on them, and then it centered around a bed. And so there's this idea that you'd lie down in this thing, and there'd be all this machinery around you. It feels very like Matrix like to me or something like that. I just I don't like thinking of technology as something where it's like a machine that I climb inside of unless it's, you know, like a Mecca or something like that. But for computer work, I much prefer visions that are about people communally working together. So like we're all going to sit together at a table or we're going to be together in a room

and we're going to use the technology in a communal way. Like I like thinking of like, you know, a family sitting around a dinner table. And if there's going to be technology in that scenario, it should be augmenting technology that benefits everyone, not just like everyone has their phones out and they're sitting around and each looking at their own phone or a one that comes up for me in my work is sometimes we'll have to go and make a simulation about some machine and so we will go and visit the

actual machine and climb inside of it and you know pull hoses out of the way and climb in the works with all the saws and things and twist ourselves around the saws and take a little iPad with us. And so that as we're bleeding out, we can at least be keeping notes of how the experience feels. So this vision of a desk that is for one person is a little bit awkward, especially because in this narrative, it's Joe Armstrong teaching you, the reader, how to use this machine and so it's kind of awkward to think about like you know okay you're just standing there kind of looking over joe's shoulder as he's using this contraption with you know keyboards and pens and stuff like that it's just it's a weird physical construction have you seen the cray one these are machines and on the outside of them they have like seating a seating area yeah they're like c-shaped if you

look at them from above these sort of like yes pie shaped segments of computers um kind of like the height of a of a rack unit in a data center but arranged in a c-shape yeah with like red cushy seating around the outside yeah so you're not you're not interacting with the computer at all you're just sitting by it sitting on the outside of it which i just i really like the idea of uh computers as furniture pieces in an office i just think that's hilarious the cray it's the most iconic supercomputer ever um i defy anyone to find a more iconic supercomputer but yes yes, there was a... Oh, let's double our digressions. We need some kind of a musical cue for like,

we're on our fourth digression down and each time we go another level of tangent, the music gets deeper and sadder and slower. We can just drop our voices. Yeah, that's right. They get deeper and deeper every time. More echo, right? We're deeper into the

cave um so i i read a an article recently um talking about some researchers i think it's stanford who were setting up this like in in the early 90s maybe even the late 80s this kind of like what if we had you know networked computers that were all aware of each other and they were they came in a bunch of different shapes and sizes and so the biggest one would be like this wall mounted kind of like a projector screen sort of thing that you could walk up to and do like whiteboard style things on and then you'd sit on a sofa and have this sort of tablet like computer that you'd use for you know working with documents and that sort of thing and maybe sketches and that and then you'd also have these little handheld

kind of pda sized things and then even like little tiny badges or tags that everybody would wear that would be you know just like small enough to fit in a pocket and that the entire building would be aware of all of these computers and so that that as people were walking around, you know, you'd know where everyone was and their data could go with them. So if they walk into a room, the wall computer would like have their data ready to go for them. And so there's, yeah, rich, rich history of computing devices that are not just one person sitting at a desk by themselves which is the most you know depressing version of computing started with you doug yep that's that's the legacy we should remember him yeah i i think for sure that's the only contribution he made uh to computing right is the the negative one inventor of the mouse yeah and and of sitting by yourself at a at a rectangle at a

keyboard all day um carpal tunnel and although he's got an ergonomic setup you know he does right you don't have a single keyboard in the front it's split right you're resting you're yeah and two pens so you can always be on offense never on defense um day pen and night pen um if anybody gets that log off you've been online too much i did not get that all right so section three it's basically joe teaches you how to use the the new augmentation machine uh which at the end of the section is named the clerk and so i will i will say the clerk to refer to this this device throughout which makes me i know he doesn't listen to podcasts he only reads transcripts so jack rusher if you named clerk after the clerk i i would love to know because i think that'd be entertaining and that would make a lot of sense anyways the clerk joe begins by explaining how it works uh

by just basically doing some stuff and making you stand there and watch him do it um and not explaining anything and you sort of watch him and you can kind of follow what it is. And you go through this little kind of internal train of thought where you kind of wonder why he's wasting your time showing you this sort of thing. And then as it goes on, you kind of see, oh, there's a lot of stuff going on that's kind of strange and I don't really understand it. And then at the end, Joe turns around and says hey i know that when i started doing this you were going to think oh why is he wasting my time and then at the end you would realize that there were some things that you didn't recognize and uh and so he kind of owns you for falling into his trap um yeah this is a weird section it's written just be clear, like it is written as it, like it speaks for you. Yeah.

Oh yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Like you made a noncommittal 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. Like it's written speaking for you, which I just find so strange.

That's why it reads like fan fiction. I can't think of any other writing other than fan fiction that does that. Fan fiction and maybe choose your own adventure books, right? Which would have been really fun. I think he should have done that. It's like a way of augmenting the explanation of the thing is to make it interactive.

Yeah, like you're like, you know, in this, it could have been yeah i'll choose your own adventure like uh joe which is definitely doug engelbart uh by the way uh but joe shows you uh you know these symbols on the screen what do you say i don't understand oh that makes sense to me flip to page 56 right like that that would have been real fun. Yeah. Yeah. So as it goes on, he begins to sort of show you – as it goes on, Joe begins to show you more and more of the capabilities of this system. And he starts with some examples of like basic text manipulation so the first thing that they do is uh they get you to say some things and joe transcribes them as you write them and the things that joe gets you to say

are basically all of the things that you have learned about this system so far so he gets you to kind of explain what you know about this system and and joe writes it down for you. And then after you do that, Joe kind of goes through the things that you've said. Even if I couldn't actually specify new symbols here any faster than with a typewriter, the extreme flexibility that this computer system provides for making changes in what is presented on the display screen would make me very much more effective in creating finished text than I could ever be on a typewriter. With this statement, Joe proceeded to show you what he meant. That

the full frame of your transcribed speech was still showing, and it represented the clumsy phrasing and illogical progression of thought so typical of extemporaneous speech. Joe took the light gun in his right hand and with a deft flick of it, coordinated with a stroke of his left hand on the key set, caused the silent and instantaneous deletion of a superfluous word. The word disappeared from the frame, and the rest of the text simultaneously readjusted to present the neat, no-gap, full-line appearance it had had. So here, I mean, the not interesting thing is that he's got text layout reflowing nicely, so if you delete some words, the text reflows.

And he later introduces copy and paste and spends a while explaining that as a manipulation. But I just like that Joe is writing down all of the things that you're saying, describing the system. And then he says that it represents the clumsy phrasing and illogical progression of thought so typical of extemporaneous speech which a is what jimmy and i are doing right now b is what doug engelbert's writing reads like anyways his writing reads like clumsy and illogical progressions of extemporaneous speech except it's like worked to within an inch of its life it is so overwrought um and yet at the same time clumsy and illogical so that you know but that's because he didn't have the augmented means yet yeah and that okay i'm glad you brought that up doug is a bad writer i don't like doug's writing i'm i'll say that i have not enjoyed

reading his writing um i enjoy his fan fiction better than I enjoy his technical manuals. It just was not a pleasure to read. And it made me wonder, like, if what he's presenting is this thing that is supposed to make you so much more capable as a person doing thoughtful work, did he feel the disconnect in quality between, like, Bush's writing and his own writing? Did he feel the disconnect in quality between like Bush's writing and his own writing? Did he feel like the quality of his writing needed to be formed into this very unappealing mold because of the context he was describes or maybe it was an earlier section somewhere in this semarillion of a paper um he describes attempting an augmentation system on his own using note cards with various patterns punched into them so that he can very quickly fish out the note cards that are linked to the card he's holding so he'll have one card that he's holding with one edge of that card with a pattern on it to identify it and then another edge of the card

to link it to something else and so he can kind of use these patterns of punchings to kind of quickly move through this system and he he found that in doing this himself that it didn't really work to augment his memory because he lost a lot of time to finding the relevant card to his interests at any given moment but that he could imagine a machine that could do that so much more quickly for him but that building such a machine probably wouldn't be worth the effort because by the time you got that machine really worked out electronic systems would be sophisticated enough to do that job even better and so he's already thinking about augmenting his own work and about taking bricks off of his pencils so to speak and so it just makes me feel a pain as a result of reading his writing and his

writing being so bad because if he's so focused on refining his own craft and improving his own ability and and bettering himself why is his writing so clunky and overwrought and poor considering he was surrounded by other people doing similar work who were better writers yeah i mean to be clear like i do i do kind of agree with you. Like his writing is, is very awkward, right? It is hard to kind of get at the ideas that are in here. And, you know, maybe there's something to it where he's, this is clearly some of this is an intentional stylistic choice, right? Like writing a fan fiction is not something I think that he just went to as, like, because he couldn't write well.

Like, he wanted to write in this way for some particular reason or other, I think, right? Don't forget, the fanfiction is the part that I like. Yes. Like, I could breeze through this. I wasn't getting hung up on every sentence going, what the hell are you even talking about? And trying to figure out, like, there were most of section two, I had to read very slowly and thoroughly and try and tease the meaning out of because it was just so unclearly presented. Where at least section three, it's clearly presented. It's weird in its tone, but at least the points he's making and the things he's suggesting come right out of the words. Yeah, and what I kind of see from this writing is it does seem like somebody who has a lot of really good ideas that hasn't figured out a way to communicate them to people that aren't him.

Yeah. Right? Like, he has these ideas. They're all interconnected and hasn't figured out the presentation to do it. Right. To get these ideas out. And I think the the mother of he wanted to be you know conveying worked better in a presentation um than it did in writing but also that by that point he had had worked with a lot of other people and was able to kind of organize these thoughts in a more logical fashion. Right. Some of it, of course,

though, is he's not in the mother of all demos. He doesn't talk at all about this very abstract stuff. No. Yeah. Like, and that's why I said, like,

I find, I found this to be more compelling than the mother of all demos, because even though this is hard to get the ideas out of, it just feels so much more packed with ideas. Yeah. There are a lot of ideas here and I definitely don't want, you know, I do think that there are ways. And I think actually it would be very useful for someone to just faithfully follow Doug's model here and lay it out differently. Yeah, like somebody should write a really killer summary of this work, like a recontextualization or a reframing that preserves the thesis and preserves the points and preserves the, you know, what Doug is so much secondary literature for this, whether they were talks or interviews from Doug or books that I was looking at, just because I was trying to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding what was here.

Right. And I definitely think that there's a lot to misunderstand. And it is. And, you know, a lot of people enjoy that. Right. I mean, there's a reason people like Kant and nicha are popular figures right yeah that they aren't very clear writers but that means you can take what they want what you want out of the text or like you know the entire domain of songwriting that is sort of about and you know like um uh tom york of radiohead is a master of

this is writing things that you can immediately understand what they are saying but the meaning behind it is is hidden or layered or nuanced and so you can kind of tease out whatever interpretation you want and and tom's mastery i think is in doing that by reusing common phrases in contexts that force a different way of looking at them. And so he'll take a saying like, chew the fat or something like that. You can take any Tom York lyric and it's like, oh yeah, I've heard that saying before. But it means something with a very, very different

kind of gravity in the way he presents it. Yeah, and I think that there is some of that. I do think some of that is probably intentional here that Doug doesn't want to spell things out too directly for fear of people misunderstanding. Really? Yeah, and I get that from one of the sections under my cringe part here. So he says we feel rather unscholarly not to buttress our conceptual framework with plentiful references to supporting work but in truth it was too difficult to do it's it's

interesting because he he goes on to say that like why was it too difficult well because they had unusual interpretations of others works or they would have to exonerate the other author from the implications we derived from their work yeah like it's this it's this kind of feeling of grasping a truth that other people haven't seen and that you want to express it in a little bit of an opaque manner and not make reference to other works because you feel that they're going to get the wrong conclusion from it and so if you just were referring to it you would think oh your ideas are very similar to this person i already know this person so i don't need to read your things and i do think there's some of this that is like you know it did force me to go back and reread sections

and i did get more understanding out of it so i can't help but wonder if some of that is intentional i took two very different things from those two things you just referenced the one about um wanting to exonerate the authors of other works from from doug's interpretations of their works to me that felt almost a little bit like this was of an era where if you referenced someone else's work and drew the wrong thing from it that might be a bad career move because it might sort of lead you to be ostracized or it might lead you to be you know looked at with suspicion or contempt if you take somebody else's work and and misconstrue it and that that would be a sort of a professional discourtesy to do that and so i i kind of felt like that might be what was behind there i don't love that interpretation yours

makes a lot of sense also i just felt to me a little bit like maybe this was a a consequence of the political atmosphere around which this work was being done not necessarily something about them wanting to uh be careful about presenting their own ideas see i guess what i took out of this that uh exonerating the other author from the implications we derived from their work is like yeah you know also the we is probably just i but uh any anyways yeah like uh it's like yeah I have some really weird ideas that a lot of people think are crazy, and I don't want these authors to feel guilty by association. That's how I kind of took this.

I mean, you know, and admittedly, he does, you know, he then goes on to cite some works that are in this flavor, but, you know, Engelbart's out on the edge here right these are not these are not mainstream ideas and a lot of people thought the whole idea of like personal computing which he does mention here was just a crazy idea and so i think that that that to me is how i read that is like i don't want other people to think these authors are crazy like i am yeah who i guess i guess we'll never know yeah yeah that's that's the sad part i wish he would have at least put like a works referred to you know like something so we knew kind of more of the context of where he's coming here like a mood board or something like that right yeah why didn't

he make a mood board the other the other thing you quoted that i i took a different interpretation of us though we feel rather unscholarly not to buttress our conceptual framework with plentiful reference to supporting work but in truth it was too difficult to do you know to me that is like the ultimate line to use if you are at a university and you are turning in your paper late and you don't have the bibliography done and you want a way to like weasel your way out of that is to say yeah i i was going to reference a lot of works but it just it wouldn't have been it wouldn't have been possible for me to do because you know it's too difficult to associate my grand ideas with this very peasant-like works

that I encountered in my research for this. So anyways, that was... I mean, that's totally possible. I took it as like this, like Heidegger did not want to use familiar terms intentionally because he didn't want the connotations involved with them. Yeah, which once again, that's like every songwriter out there is like,

no, I'm not going to study music theory because I don't want it to limit the range of ideas that i would come up with on my own whereas if i went and you know actually learned like the names for chords and progressions and some theory stuff it like you know then i'd only be able to think in terms of existing music practice and not really invent my own music which there's actually some sense to that i i have a lot of sympathy for that perspective as a music theory nerd so and so back in section three right like you've i think you've done a good job of showing like this kind of visual picture but like the way i would summarize all these activities is it's all about making clear meanings of words and structures of arguments.

It's all about precision in thoughts. And every other capability, like the word editing stuff, is not in and of itself the cool thing. It's not like, hey, look, we can do text editing. It's this all serves to let us be more precise about our thoughts. such systems need to have. These examples are just hypotheticals that should help ground these ideas for you a little bit. And then once we're done with this, throw those examples away and go invent something of your own. But these examples, I found them really helpful. Like they range from simple things like you can call up the definition of any word to, you know, you can take any sequence of words and create an abbreviation for them and then

whenever you want to type that sequence of words you can type that abbreviation but also you know sequences of characters within a word or if it's like you know the ly at the end of a word is a really common sequence so you can come up with one key for that L Y with a space after it. So you don't have to type those things or things like, you know, once you have an abbreviation for a word or a part of a thing, if you don't remember what the abbreviation is, you can just type the longer form and then call up the abbreviation for that longer thing. So you can work the other way if you need that reminder, Or you can start, you know, structuring together these different sentences or paragraphs or pages and start working with them at different levels of detail. And you can start, you know, zooming out and seeing more abstracted representations of all

of these things that you're building that are structured and that those zoomed out views might look like a network showing you connections of things so they might look like some kind of a directed thing with arrows so they might look some like some kind of schematic presentation and you can work with that schematic presentation and then quickly zoom in to see any individual part of it and this comes up in more when he gets into working with code as opposed to working with data or to use Engelbert's terms, working with the process part rather than working with the symbol part. He has these. Is that symbol? Is that the word for the other thing?

I think that's right. Yeah, it's processes. And that's the problem with all of Doug's terminologies. It's like at a certain point, I lose track of what each thing is in relation to the other things. But yeah, process in this section is talking about what you can do when you actually start working with programming the clerk to do other kinds of jobs for you that it doesn't already do because the earlier part of section three is talking about you know working with data working with information working with text and sentences and words and paragraphs but then also other kinds of information and then and then this the later part of section three is okay now let's actually look at code and describing behavior and process and that sort of thing um and not just process in terms of what does the clerk do for you

what does it do internally but also process uh as it relates to other people working in and around you on some kind of a bigger project and having a zoomed out view of what process means and being able to incorporate both things that the the clerk is going to do internally but also things that you might have to go and do yourself or that somebody else might be doing and how do you keep track of all of those things happening and tie them together and then automatically surface recommendations for oh you know here's a pattern that occurs over and over again and that this part of the pattern happens slowly and so we should investigate finding ways to make that part of the pattern faster, because then all of these places where we're using it

will be more efficient. So there's this, like, all of the things that are happening at every level are put into structures and then are interrogated and are rearranged, and this is where all that semantic web rdf kind of feeling comes in where it's like you know we're going to build this system of systems and the systems are going to be able to interact with themselves and they're going to be able to self-improve and get better but not in the kind of the general ai kind of singularity sense of self-improve but just the like you know if you

build a machine that is very good at cutting metal you know more precisely than ever before that'll let you build a better machine that can you know be even better at cutting metal and eventually you have you know nanoscale precision or whatever like yeah he calls this the bootstrapping idea right and or a regenerative interaction is another way he puts it that like part of the important part of being able to do this programmatic thing is that we can now evolve the system to let us have new capabilities and then these new capabilities let us evolve the system. So instead of a computer singularity, it's like computer human bootstrapping itself and getting smarter and smarter and smarter over time.

But it's the combined system together being smarter, not an AI running off and then turning us all into paperclips. Yeah. And I just like, and it's, Doug even says this, and I'm going to say this for the benefit of the listener. If you are hearing us talk about this work and having as many mixed feelings as we have about it, and for some reason you still find yourself compelled to go and read it if you haven't read it yet, I would do something that Doug himself actually suggests early in the paper and read section three before you read section two. Because at the start of section two, he says, hey, if this section is hard to read, you might want to skip ahead and read section three first and then come back and read section two. And I kind of wish I'd taken that advice because section three, it helps so much to have an example that you can hang all of these abstract ideas off of and then go learn about the the

deeper relationships between all these abstract ideas i almost wish that it had been written in that order where you you read the example first and then you get to the conceptual framework but then of course that would have that brett victor problem of people over index on the examples and don't pick up on the on the way that you are suggesting that you should generalize from those examples so which is what doug saw you know like if you if you look at things later on he he thinks that people missed the point and you know brett victor himself makes this point about doug's work right that he's the inventor of the mouse right that's what doug engelbart, yeah. And some of the big important factors

that people talk about that I do think, you know, are interesting to see kind of sprinkled in through section three are this very collaborative focus. Yeah. Right? Yeah. But I think the collaboration takes a very different flavor than you see in like the mother of all demos

where some of the collaboration is about using precise definitions and that each person kind of has their it's not just that there's a dictionary it's your dictionary right you have your precise definitions of every term and then you go and you're talking with your co-worker and it turns out you're having a disagreement and so what you do is you go sit down at the terminology interface and you work out these little shifts in meaning. And you replace your precise definitions with theirs and you figure out how are to the computer, to the clerk clerk as a relationship to existing concepts and then it would crunch on that and he says you know this would actually be a process that is a lot slower than the other ones that you've seen you know slower than the other ones you've seen joe doing

and uh that it would take maybe three seconds to come back with a response and you know the response would be you know here is the name that we're suggesting for this concept and then here are you know other related concepts to this one and how those relationships work and then a couple of other uh aspects and and it's getting to the point where he spends a lot of this i would think both sections two and three like grappling with that mismatch between the human's need or the human's tendency towards imprecision and flexibility and and you know multiple interpretations and the computer's need for precision and repeatability and consistency and it and it does feel like you said earlier a little bit like he wants to

kind of force language into a more precise you know a narrower channel and and have fewer meanings but he does do those things like you're talking about like everybody having their own you know dictionaries of of terminology and exchanging them and copying them around so you can understand what somebody else means and he does he does seem to want to support the fact that human beings are imprecise throughout all this like he does want to preserve that quality of everybody having their own different interpretations and their own way of of looking at things and that comes up again and again there's lots of parts of the system that are not just about forcing human beings into a kind of a robotic technical way of framing all their thinking he does want to accommodate the looser kind of thinking that people do and i think

an example of that that i wanted to bring up and something we didn't talk about very much yet is the part of section three where he talks about how you program the clerk and what kind of programming work you do and how you define new processes that are just about what the clerk can do in this kind of process structuring. There are, of course, the explicit computer processes which we use and which our philosophy requires the augmented person to be able to design and build for themselves. A number of people outside our research group here, and this is, once again, Joe talking,

a number of people outside our research group here maintain stoutly that a practical augmentation system should not require the human to have to do any computer programming. They feel that this is too specialized a capability to burden people with. Well, what that means in our eyes, if translated to a home workshop, would be like saying that you can't require the operating human to know how to adjust their tools or set up jigs or change drill sizes and the like. You can see that there are these skills that are easy to learn in the context of what the human has to learn anyway about using these tools and that they provide for much greater flexibility and finding convenient ways to use the tools to help shape materials so i i liked that passage because it sort of it came so close to

something that we often hear people say when they're talking about no code low code that sort of thing where it's like and this also came up in uh man computer symbiosis talking about how you know a ceo or a or an army general shouldn't have to learn how to type on a keyboard because they're too busy to do that and this is you know joe saying well some of our colleagues at other hypothetical research labs don't believe that you should have to program but we believe that you do and you know programming should just be like you know changing a drill bit on a drill i think there's a lot to that there's a lot there to think about and to we could hang many tangents off of like is programming like changing a drill maybe in this clerk system it could be like that you give some examples um you know based on lisp

and algol and fortran but maybe you know maybe programming is is too complex and and maybe it should be more like changing a drill bit or maybe not maybe programming programming is a, is a necessary thing because it empowers you. Like there's so many game developers, indie game developers out there who, who argue that if you want to make your own games and you want to be a game designer and you have some art skills, you really owe it to yourself to learn how to program because the only way to fully express any novel interesting ideas about how games could be will require you to be

able to program to express those ideas and that if you if you can't program you're going to be pretty trapped into following existing patterns of game design and you're not going to be able to do something more novel and i'm pretty sure this is a Jonathan Blow argument that I'm just parroting. But yeah, it's that age-old question of how much programming is too much, and Doug is already weighing into it here in a way that just filled my heart with many feelings.

Yeah, I do think it's... I kind of had two minds about this section because in some ways it does sound like this kind of end user programming and at the same time maybe it's just you know this is so early and you know there's not a lot of imagination on what computers could look like uh but so much of it seems more akin to yeah and people are just gonna have to learn how to program because it's worthwhile for them to take the time to learn this system to do the things and less of like and we need to make it accessible right it seems to me you know maybe this is my bias into this text but it seems like

he really wants uh computer use to be more like programming rather than programming to be more like everyday things, right? Once you learn the non-programmatic aspects of this system, you'll realize, oh, I've actually been learning things that are not that different from programming, is I guess the way I might put it that's that's interesting to think about considering that this is right at the dawn of programming as we know it and so thinking of it as he wants computer use to be just like programming if you then if you take that idea together with the idea that programming, as it's being developed in the early 60s, is a reflection of the context in which it's being invented. So, you know, it's funded by the military. It's in a business context. It's being done by engineers and mathematicians and logicians. It's very structured um it's you know like there's a reason that if was a was a significant advancement and that whole idea of structured programming that's an advancement that came from people who

want to be able to encode their thinking in a way that resembles formal systems of logic so it might not be that what doug is thinking that, you know, we want computer use to that it is very much about a group of people in corporation working together to some structural goal. And that it's sort of like that. I can't remember the name who coined this, but it's idea that the the software that an organization builds is a reflection of the structure of that organization and so it might be that the the way that he's thinking about all of this is less that it it resembles programming but that programming and all of this just are a reflection of the kind of organization that he's in as he's coming up with this stuff and that if he was in a different context and this might go back to like okay if we were going to get a different context

here at the dawn of computing we'd need like something other than capitalism or whatever like you could very quickly zoom out into okay what is it that enabled these structures to exist such that they would you know create a programming but it all has that feel of like, you know, not just precision for the sake of making it like a machine, you know, like a computer, but that the machine, the computer is a, an organization that mirrored the human structures that birthed it. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think you're absolutely right. In fact, I think he goes into this sort of thing. He calls them composite processes, processes that combine both these programmatic processes and the human processes, right? And so

much of what this structuring looks like is combining these two. And he is thinking about, you know, organizational structure and the processes you have to do to get work done. And yeah, no, I think you're, you're definitely right in that regard. And I think what he wants is that these, I guess what I would say is like, it definitely seems more like a meeting in the middle than a one side or the other, right? Like he wants programming to maybe be more like human normal thought and process structuring, but he also wants thought and process structuring to kind of become more precise and rigorous and logical and all the things that, you know,

we think about programming being. Would it have even been possible for Doug to be more adamant about accommodating human beings and their sort of softness and flexibility and and variability um would that argument have even you know even more rapidly had him laughed out of the room the way maybe some of these ideas did at the time like we definitely have this picture of doug as being this outsider and never really seeing his ideas take hold in the way that you know i'm sure he hoped they would have been um despite the fact that he was kind of um uh to borrow uh one of his sayings from earlier he's sort of clothing them in fiction um he's sort of you know presenting them in the best way that he possibly can to fit them into the context if his ideas were even more soft and humane i wish i could

have seen what computer industry that would have made yeah and i know at least from what i could see that it seems uh an emphasis on user friendliness was actually like something engelbart really did not like yeah at all yeah and that's the training in the helmet right like if you can have a more powerful system and be trained to use it and achieve that training if that training is a realistic achievable goal then you shouldn't limit the capability of the system just to make it easier to get started with yeah totally and and this is where i have i have one quote under pithy uh this is one of my And I think this is actually a really interesting phrasing of this that kind of reinforces this point. He says, after all, we spend great sums for disciplines aimed at understanding and harnessing nuclear power.

Why not consider developing a discipline aimed at understanding and harnessing neural power in the long run the power of the human intellect is really much the more important of the two this is how he ends the paper and uh compared to lick's ending of the paper this one's much uh much more powerful here right like why not focus on how can we extend our neural power that's very much like a uh you go ahead no go ahead i was gonna say that that line is very much like a uh don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force. I'm glad I let you go ahead. Yeah, I just think, you know, we could,

I think we could continue on talking about some of the descriptions in three. I think there's still more that we could talk about in two. I think that's one of the things about this paper is there are endless things to talk about, but I would love to kind of like, you know, we've given a little bit of our flavor of how we took this paper, but I'd love to just kind of dig into that like i i had very mixed feelings about it right like it in some ways i kind of came into it with some bias because i had already

seen the mother of all demos and i really just thought this was going to be like the forerunner to the mother of all demos. And it's not, um, and in other ways I found myself feeling like I needed to love it because it's a classic, right? Like it is considered a great, important paper. And I,

and I see why. And I, I appreciate that at the same time. There's a lot here that I just find of its moment in a way that i didn't find with lick like there is such an emphasis on this symbol structuring there's such an emphasis on these argumentation focusing on making them precise and clear and exact and it and there's this like behavioralism aspect to it. There's just, it feels to me,

and again, maybe this is my bias, but it feels like this positivistic, like if we could just get, be rigorous and exact in all that we say, then we would solve the world's problems. Yeah. And I do, I want, I want to believe that in some ways and i guess maybe that's why

i kind of like repel against it because i know that that's not the case right like it's not how how we work and while he like does try to make accommodations for the fuzziness and imprecise it always seems to make those accommodations up front so that you can get into the system where they're all eliminated. It's never staying in that imprecision. It's always an entryway into this greater picture of the computer as the ultimate organizational system

that will clear up all of our linguistic problems. And I do think that underlying all of this is this belief that most problems would be dissolved if we just had clear language. And his view is the only way we're going to get that is to transcend natural language into the realm of computer augmented, automatic external symbol manipulation. I've got a passage that I want to read that I think reflects what you've just said, and also maybe our relationship as readers, and maybe the broader community's relationship as readers with

this paper itself. And this is from section three, so it's Joe is saying this to you, the reader. A number of us here are using the augmented systems for our project research and we find that after a few passes through a reference we very rarely go back to it in its original form it sits in the archives like an orange rind with most of the real juice squeezed out the contributions from these references form sturdy members of our structure and are duly tagged as to source so that acknowledgement is always implicitly noted.

The analysis and digestion that any of us makes on such a reference is fully available to the others. And this is the part that I highlighted especially. It's rather amazing how much superfluous verbiage is contained in those papers merely to try and make up for the pitifully sparse possibilities available for symbol structuring in printed text. I think that that is exactly the point that you are making, Jimmy, is that he envisions this world where, you know, language as we have it today is diminished in its importance. It's the rind of the orange and i i absolutely agree with him on

that like as a as a proponent of visual programming which actually comes up um in this paper there's a section here where he talks about talks about schematic techniques that have evolved out of program flow charting techniques uh and out of our symbol structuring techniques he talks about this hierarchy where like at the bottom sure you can our symbol structuring techniques he talks about this hierarchy where like at the bottom sure you can do symbol structuring programming but that's no good you want to go up from that to flow charting and you want to go up from that even higher to this like schematic way of programming um which i you know appreciate yeah it's just this like you know language as we use it to communicate ideas is such a loss lossy medium, and it is so imprecise, and it is so personal.

And I made this joke on Twitter as I was reading this about how, you know, as I'm reading this and I'm thinking about amplification versus augmentation, and how he settles on the term augmentation but he considers the term amplification for a little bit and it made me think that like like when you have an electric guitar you know plugged into an amplifier that's like the loudest guitar right like that is you know jimmy hendrix soloing that's like liturgy that's like uh oh is it rise chatham who does the like the symphony for 400 electric guitars where they get like 400 electric guitarists in a park in New York and they all plug in and play these huge chords that are just, you know, impossibly loud. You can have the electric guitar be this incredible tool for making a loud noise, but when you unplug the electric guitar, it is just impossibly quiet. Like it is one of

the quietest instruments. Just strumming an unplugged electric guitar is the saddest, tiniest little noise that I almost never hear people use in music. It comes up once in a while, but I almost never hear somebody use the unplugged electric guitar as a means of creative expression as an expressive instrument and the acoustic guitar which you could argue is also amplifying its sound the sound of the strings is being amplified by the hollowness of the body and the resonance of the wood and that sort of thing but it is it's that thing i brought up on man computer symbiosis about the the difference between japanese fiction where you know the hero has an arm cannon versus american science fiction where the the hero has a laser

gun and the gun can be taken away you can't really take away the amplification from the acoustic guitar you can't unplug it you can you can kind of plug the cavity with things to make it quieter and you sometimes do that to avoid feedback you know amplifying an acoustic guitar but the amplification of it is intrinsic it's inherent it's part of the thing itself and the amplification of the electric guitar is not intrinsic it's designed for that but you need the guitar and the amplifier and reading this it seems very much of that view that you know we're going to create a system that the system is the thing where all of the capability and power comes from and that the more we can embrace the system the better and that the system is not just the machine it's not just the electronics it's not just the the pens hanging

down it's not just that physical thing it's not just the pens hanging down. It's not just that physical thing. It's also your knowledge of how to use it, your training. It's also the business within which you are using it and the other people at that business and what they can do as part of a process that you design. And it doesn't really have anything in here that feels to me like it embraces what a human being is. It only embraces what human beings have built and what they are building again out of what they have built. And that filled me with a bit of a sadness reading this that I don't normally get from reading computer science papers. Computer science papers don't normally make me feel a sadness that this one did.

And maybe that sadness is just something I was looking for, because I hated reading the writing so much. The writing of Doug Engelbert is not joyful to read. And reading Buckminster, or not Buckminster Fuller, reading Vannevar Bush's import, as we may think, just reaffirmed that so much for me. But yeah, there's just something about this that I was not expecting to dislike as much as I did dislike it. It's interesting. You know, you talked at the beginning up front that there were a bunch of things that you wanted out of this. You know, I guess, as we've been talking through this, I, you know, I just find it interesting. Also, like, even my take on this paper changes as we, you know, have these discussions, which is one of the reasons I want these

discussions, right? Like, I definitely didn't gravitate towards section three and you putting, putting out that that actually might be the better starting point, uh, you know, really did make me reflect on some of the, the, the earlier sections. But I would be curious to hear, what parts did you want out of this? You said up front there were things that you wish you had that you don't. Yeah, and this is going to be a little bit of a contrarian position compared to what I've just said. But that ability to actually enter a lot of data into a computer

and have the computer be aware of the connections between it and be able to make suggestions. And I don't want that from data per se, because a lot of this is just Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia gives us a lot of what is described in Section 3. Not all of it. There's certainly things that you know it would be nice to do that wikipedia can't do and and the aforementioned jack rusher's project clerk seems to be doing a little bit of that at least the way he's using it along with wiki data and some of his other data sources it seems like he's kind of playing in that space a little bit

and there are you know countless projects that have done that where it's like hey there's apis for all sorts of things and there are some nice tools from the data visualization world or the analytics world that we can use to crunch all of that together and draw out some interesting realizations. felt is available to me in the way that like when i was a kid and we bought a black and white mac like hypercard was suddenly available to me in a way that you know it's like a seven-year-old or whatever i could start clicking around on claris the dog cow and and learning what the mouse is and a little interactive kind of stack of cards and start editing that stack and building my own and there was this like this capability there that was near to me and i don't feel that the capability to structure my my thoughts or structure aspects of of information around me is near to me in the same way and i think that's acutely the case when it comes to programming and how we actually are able to tell computers what to do it's so different from what doug describes even though

he doesn't spend very much time on it the time that he does spend talking about what it will be like to program this system is exactly in line with all of the things that we say in our community and on this show it's it's very much about this lifting your way up from having to manipulate abstract symbols in text towards you know a rich representation of a of a process and lots of things happening there and that you can zoom up and down the ladder of abstraction and have a really rich sense of what things will happen and why will they happen and be able to answer those sorts of questions about them and that's that's what i got out of section three that i was sort of hoping to get out of it was a little bit of a a perspective on on how we program and what our relationship with the computer is. And so that did come through for me.

Yeah, I think if I had to take my most positive take on this, because, you know, I know I have criticized some of this, but I do think the overall aim is really interesting. And this augmentation, I do actually think that this is very important and interesting. And this augmentation, I do actually think that this is very important and interesting. And I think that we have failed to do it in some respects. I think even in the respects that he really wants to talk about here,

I was actually having a philosophy discussion with a friend and there was some argument structure that he was trying to make uh but one of the variables in this argument structure was like a really long sentence and so we abbreviated it like p um for the proposition and we were trying to like talk and we just couldn't actually talk about it well so i wrote a program uh that it's called proposition filler it's just a little website, and you write out the structure of the argument, and then you can fill in the structure and then send a link to somebody so they can see what your argument is. But I had to write this using normal

code. This wasn't something we could have this conversation in. So there are things where like i could see his particular means being good but i don't know a lot of them feel very much of his time right his means are wrong but i think his aim is wonderful and i think that's what i would want to focus on right like this augmentation of human intellect using using the artifacts that we have, helping us with our language. If you just take that vision and import all the things I think we know about how language works, how humans work, that maybe just weren't understood at his time, or that he didn't focus on, I think you get a really compelling vision. And I think, you know, some of that is represented in like, Brett victor's the humane representation of thought yeah right yeah there is this this

tradition we don't have to take the exact things that are you know the answers given in this paper we instead take the problem and the goal and really run with it and i think that would be a very exciting uh research project for someone to focus on. Absolutely. And that's just like, again, like there's so many ways of pulling out that same thing from this paper. Like, you know, what if this paper, but Doug was pushing for a more human embracing version of it? What if this paper, but Doug wasn't employed by the Air Force and was instead employed by, you know, like a knitting factory or something like that, right? Like there's so many other versions of this paper that could exist that I think would be much more satisfying than

this one, just because this one, maybe, and maybe it's just because this one shaped the world that we have. And so we're tired of that world. We're sad about that world um one other thing from this paper that i wanted to shout out as something that i really liked about it is page uh 66 and 67 in the print out of the pdf of the ocr'd whatever it was that i have full of typos yes someone clearly yeah yeah um it it it's this uh this section where he talks about different kinds of computing memory that exist how many symbols they could store where a symbol is defined as a word of six bits and uh how quickly you can access those symbols uh and how quickly you can access those symbols and how much they will cost. And he goes through drum memory and magnetic core memory and tape memory and I think one or two other kinds. And it's just this like, you know, in the middle of nowhere, this little breakdown of like here's all the different kinds of of storage that exist in 1962 from a you know a speed and cost perspective and capacity i just love that because

it's just like a little little taste of history in there that you know kind of grounded this for me um and i i hope that we get more of that as we're reading some of the earlier papers that we read it's just a little it's a little taste of life in the 60s that's not about gender that is about you know uh quaintly slow and expensive old computers because i i have a soft spot for that yeah it's definitely fun to see these kind of like antique roadshow kind of uh sections yeah and just thinking about him being excited about these at the time, like thinking, you know,

you know, you know how fast they're all getting better. They're, they're all getting so much better. It's easy to imagine where it would go soon. And then, you know, that just like sparks the imagination for thinking about like,

wow, if we could store, you know, this many millions of symbols, that's enough to, you know, begin storing like, you know, thousands of books in a library or something like that and if you have all your library books digitized then you know what does that enable you to do and you can just kind of feel him like following the chain of consequences of what will happen as technology

improves and and probably coming up with a lot of his ideas just in going through that exercise and i just you know as somebody who lives in a world where over the span of a decade or two like technology improves but not in terms of its specs in in ways that enable transformative things um it changes in ways maybe like the ubiquity of smartphones and and networking now that was a big one but there's just there's it feels like maybe there's less of this potential for where things could go like maybe there'll be vr maybe there'll be maybe somebody will come up with a good use of a blockchain like thing maybe maybe that'll happen um you know maybe maybe the technology will be that we solve the climate crisis right and then we can stop imagining the end of humanity and can instead imagine like you

know oh the 2300s might actually be a good time to be alive right so definitely um i love these little tastes of anachronism yeah and i think the most important thing that we got from this is that we're we're going to spawn off a whole new kind of literature, which is going to be Engelbart fan fiction, where we take Joe, our character, and shove him into all these new visions, right? And so that's what I want to see from the future of coding community. Any better writers than Engelbart, you know, write up the new, the next vision. That's not a high bar right yes the next vision of what joe's doing immortal joe continues on augmenting and what does it look like now right that's what i want to see the many adventures of joe armstrong Thank you. Panpsychism.com Alkaloids.com Elephants.net

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