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When Robin originally suggested that Douglas Engelbart, best known as the inventor of the computer mouse, would have been a good candidate for taking over the world via compound interest on tools that make tools, my initial reaction was "What on Earth? With a mouse?"
On reading the initial portions of Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework", it became a lot clearer where Robin was coming from.
Sometimes it's hard to see through the eyes of the past. Engelbart was a computer pioneer, and in the days when all these things were just getting started, he had a vision of using computers to systematically augment human intelligence. That was what he thought computers were for. That was the ideology lurking behind the mouse. Something that makes its users smarter - now that sounds a bit more plausible as an UberTool.
Looking back at Engelbart's plans with benefit of hindsight, I see two major factors that stand out:
- Engelbart committed the Classic Mistake of AI: underestimating how much cognitive work gets done by hidden algorithms running beneath the surface of introspection, and overestimating what you can do by fiddling with the visible control levers.
- Engelbart anchored on the way that someone as intelligent as Engelbart would use computers, but there was only one of him - and due to point 1 above, he couldn't use computers to make other people as smart as him.
To start with point 2: They had more reverence for computers back in the old days. Engelbart visualized a system carefully designed to flow with every step of a human's work and thought, assisting every iota it could manage along the way. And the human would be trained to work with the computer, the two together dancing a seamless dance.
And the problem with this, was not just that computers got cheaper and that programmers wrote their software more hurriedly.
There's a now-legendary story about the Windows Vista shutdown menu, a simple little feature into which 43 different Microsoft people had input. The debate carried on for over a year. The final product ended up as the lowest common denominator - a couple of hundred lines of code and a very visually unimpressive menu.
So even when lots of people spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about a single feature of the system - it still didn't end up very impressive. Jef Raskin could have done better than that, I bet. But Raskins and Engelbarts are rare.
You see the same effect in Eric Drexler's chapter on hypertext in Engines of Creation: Drexler imagines the power of the Web to... use two-way links and user annotations to promote informed criticism. (As opposed to the way we actually use it.) And if the average Web user were Eric Drexler, the Web probably would work that way by now.
But no piece of software that has yet been developed, by mouse or by Web, can turn an average human user into Engelbart or Raskin or Drexler. You would very probably have to reach into the brain and rewire neural circuitry directly; I don't think any sense input or motor interaction would accomplish such a thing.
Which brings us to point 1.
It does look like Engelbart was under the spell of the "logical" paradigm that prevailed in AI at the time he made his plans. (Should he even lose points for that? He went with the mainstream of that science.) He did not see it as an impossible problem to have computers help humans think - he seems to have underestimated the difficulty in much the same way that the field of AI once severely underestimated the work it would take to make computers themselves solve cerebral-seeming problems. (Though I am saying this, reading heavily between the lines of one single paper that he wrote.) He talked about how the core of thought is symbols, and speculated on how computers could help people manipulate those symbols.
I have already said much on why people tend to underestimate the amount of serious heavy lifting that gets done by cognitive algorithms