dows 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 hidden inside black boxes that run out of your introspective vision, and overestimating what you can do by duplicating the easily visible introspective control levers. The word "apple", for example, is a visible lever; you can say it or not say it, its presence or absence is salient. The algorithms of a visual cortex that let you visualize what an apple would look like upside-down - we all have these in common, and they are not introspectively accessible. Human beings knew about apples a long, long time before they knew there was even such a thing as the visual cortex, let alone beginning to unravel the algorithms by which it operated.
Robin Hanson asked me:
"You really think an office worker with modern computer tools is only 10% more productive than one with 1950-era non-computer tools? Even at the task of creating better computer tools?"
But remember the parable of the optimizing compiler run on its own source code - maybe it makes itself 50% faster, but only once; the changes don't increase its ability to make future changes. So indeed, we should not be too impressed by a 50% increase in office worker productivity - not for purposes of asking about FOOMs. We should ask whether that increase in productivity translates into tools that create further increases in productivity.
And this is where the problem of underestimating hidden labor, starts to bite. Engelbart rhapsodizes (accurately!) on the wonders of being able to cut and paste text while writing, and how superior this should be compared to the typewriter. But suppose that Engelbart overestimates, by a factor of 10, how much of the intellectual labor of writing goes into fighting the typewriter. Then because Engelbart can only help you cut and paste more easily, and cannot rewrite those hidden portions of your brain that labor to come up with good sentences and good arguments, the actual improvement he delivers is a tenth of what he thought it would be. An anticipated 20% improvement becomes an actual 2% improvement. k way less than 1.
This will hit part