Inventors of the Future:
Engelbart & Kay in Conversation about What’s Next
by Eileen Clegg
"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!"
The two men who each have been called the "father of modern computing" sat down for a conversation and, like two parents lamenting the choices of their offspring, wondered when the new generation of technology will take more responsibility for their future. Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay believe the world has yet to catch up with the vision of 40 year ago: That technology would raise humankind's collective IQ toward global problem-solving.
"People could understand your easiest ideas, like the mouse and pointing and hyperlinking, but they had a lot of trouble understanding your really big ideas, like augmenting the intelligence of groups of adults,'' Kay said to Engelbart. "Your thinking about how this is all going to turn out is correct but it's still yet to happen."
Engelbart and Kay were pioneers of the technological breakthroughs in the late 1960s that brought about the Internet Age. Engelbart may be best known for what is now affectionately called “the mother of all demos” – the day in 1968 at Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto when he sat down in front of the first computer screen connected to a keyboard with his hand on a data-moving device that he later patented as the computer mouse. A couple years later, Kay was a key player on the team at Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center to invent the prototype of the personal computer.
As the 40th anniversary of the “mother of all demos” approaches, Kay and Engelbart met up at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View where visitors from other countries treated the two men like rock stars, asking them to autograph their notebooks and at least one baseball cap. To serious students of computer history, Kay and Engelbart are the giants of technology. It probably would have surprised these visitors to hear the quiet conversation between the two men about how they struggle for funding to continue their research and search for open minds to hear their argument that the computer revolution again needs the kind of spark that ignited their inventions.
“You had the aspect of an old Testament prophet coming out and showing the Promised Land across the Jordan for anyone who would listen,” Kay recalled about the first time he heard Engelbart speak more than 40 years ago. The vision behind Engelbart’s high profile inventions, contained in his 1962 philosophical paper, is a system enabling people to aggregate ideas and navigate information in a way that would “augment human intelligence” – a vision that would have diffused technology in a much different way than what has occurred. One major difference was that Engelbart’s vision focused on problem-solving.
Engelbart’s seminal paper described a comprehensive picture of how individuals could collaborate to solve complex problems. It foreshadowed hyperlinking, the World Wide Web, blogs, wikis, online knowledge management tools, videoconferencing, file/photo/video sharing and .pdfs where every word of a document can be addressed and linked. Even some of his more esoteric ideas have diffused, such as the idea that cross-disciplinary researchers could “map” information to find the cutting edge of thought; the original futures research firm Institute for the Future was co-founded in 1971 by Engelbart’s one-time boss at SRI.
But all of the components that are working in the world today do not work together in the way Engelbart had envisioned as the way for people to systematically organize their ideas across disciplines to “raise the collective IQ.”
Kay, who today focuses on youths and learning, agreed with Engelbart that the synthesis is missing. He predicted that the next wave of innovation on the Web will carry forward those who focus on a “summarizer” rather than “extractor” tools for information and wondered if it would come from Google? Yahoo? Adobe? The federal government? “Does the government have a taste for organizing its own information system?” Kay asked.
The two visionaries circled in on what seems to be the barrier to taking the next step of evolution for technology -- a lack of “systems thinking” on the part of those responsible for technology systems today: Technology developers, computer science departments, funders of research in technology, and the users themselves who are satisfied with what Kay called “incremental changes.”
“Less progress has been made in the last 25 years than before 1980...the commercialization of technology spread it wide and thin without getting to the real heart of the matter,” Kay said. “We call it reinventing the flat tire. We wish they’d reinvent the wheel.”
Engelbart said a big piece that is missing in today’s technology picture is what he calls the “improvement system” – communities of people who focus specifically on systems thinking across disciplines. He has talked and written for years about the guidelines for such a system but it’s not something a single inventor can do. “It’s not inventing ‘an object’ but things being invented concurrently,” he said.
His 1961 idea of the “co-evolution of human and tool systems” became a popular concept. In fact cameraman at the 1968 Demo, Stewart Brand, went on to found the popular “Co-Evolutionary Quarterly.” Engelbart’s idea about co-evolution was that users would work with technology developers so that the nuances of human perception would be integrated into the development of technology.
He recalled how that got him in trouble with funders from the beginning. Back in the late 1960’s, “We brought real users into the Lab and hired coaches to work with them.” Instead of supporting this approach, the people who controlled the funding said the technology should be smart enough to already know what the users wanted. Years later, he had an opportunity to work with Microsoft’s research center but turned it down because of disagreements over his desire to involve users in an open process.
Without building the “human systems” into the big picture of technology development, what has happened is that information is moving faster and faster without an overall vision about the goal, both men agreed. “Faster thinking without a better framework is a disaster,” said Kay.
They also agreed that part of the problem is the discipline of computer science, which they believe has suffered in scholarship, lost a connection to the philosophical groundwork and instead overemphasized tools themselves.“Computer science is an oxymoron,” said Kay, who believes that the discipline itself has become stagnant. For example he said at UCLA there are 25 departments of biology and only one computer science. “Biology created more departments as the old ones got moribund.”
Another problem is funding, which also tends to follow a conservative path compared to years ago when the computer revolution was launched with passion and projects that were “in tune with the heart strings” Kay recalled wistfully.
Kay has decided to skip a generation and now puts his faith in the next generation. He has established the Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization to improve the use of technology for learning. Kay has hope for future generations to use technology in a wiser way because they do not need to be pushed into shifting their thinking, “children are born into new paradigms.”
Engelbart is still trying to work with adults, speaking with groups ranging from academics to journalists to government organizations, including the National Knowledge Commission of India to help them envision a better approach to improving their systems and thinking toward solving complex problems. His nonprofit Bootstrap Institute is continuing to to pursue Engelbart’s technology and philosophical visions. Engelbart is driven by the belief that “if we don’t get collectively smarter, we’re going to crash.” One recent example he gave of how technology could have worked so much better was Hurricane Katrina. He believes that problems such as global learning could be solved if people were to organize information and themselves into “networked improvement communities” where wisdom would emerge from highly structured cross-discipline research.
One of his ideas that the world seems to be catching up to is the concept of a “logician” – someone who navigates information within any given domain and structures it in a way that clarifies. If there are “certified public accountants” making sure people share rules of accounting for money, why can’t there by “certified public logicians” making sure people follow rules of logic for information? It’s a controversial stance in the current “everything goes” environment of the Web, where it’s up to the individual to do all the sorting and sense making but Kay encouraged Engelbart to try and evangelize some of his ideas about structuring information on the Web.
But while he believes Engelbart has some of the solutions, he cautioned about barriers that seem to stop people from looking back. “People are too busy putting stakes in the ground. They are not studying the past.”
Unlike, for example, the disciplines of science and physics, Kay observed, computer science does not have a tradition for ongoing study and scholarship of seminal thinkers.
Listening to the words between the two fathers of modern computing, many would say, “we’ve heard that all before.” The words perhaps. But the real meanings? The untapped potential? Kay said he often urges his students to Google “Doug Engelbart” and look beyond the stories of his inventions to some of the ideas that haven’t yet taken form.
“There is still a lot of work to be done.”
|
