icularly hard if you think that computers, with some hard work on the user interface, and some careful training of the humans, ought to be able to help humans with the type of "creative insight" or "scientific labor" that goes into inventing new things to do with the computer. If you thought that the surface symbols were where most of the intelligence resided, you would anticipate that computer improvements would hit back hard to this meta-level, and create people who were more scientifically creative and who could design even better computer systems.
But if really you can only help people type up their ideas, while all the hard creative labor happens in the shower thanks to very-poorly-understood cortical algorithms - then you are much less like neutrons cascading through uranium, and much more like an optimizing compiler that gets a single speed boost and no more. It looks like the person is 20% more productive, but in the aspect of intelligence that potentially cascades to further improvements they're only 2% more productive, if that.
(Incidentally... I once met a science-fiction author of a previous generation, and mentioned to him that the part of my writing I most struggled with, was my tendency to revise and revise and revise things I had already written, instead of writing new things. And he said, "Yes, that's why I went back to the typewriter. The word processor made it too easy to revise things; I would do too much polishing, and writing stopped being fun for me." It made me wonder if there'd be demand for an author's word processor that wouldn't let you revise anything until you finished your first draft.
But this could be chalked up to the humans not being trained as carefully, nor the software designed as carefully, as in the process Engelbart envisioned.)
Engelbart wasn't trying to take over the world in person, or with a small group. Yet had he tried to go the UberTool route, we can reasonably expect he would have failed - that is, failed at advancing far beyond the outside world in internal computer technology, while selling only UberTool's services to outsiders.
Why? Because it takes too much human labor to develop computer software and computer hardware, and this labor cannot be automated away as a one-time cost. If the world outside your window has a thousand times as many brains, a 50% productivity boost that only cascades to a 10% and then a 1% additional productivity boost, will not let you win against the world. If your UberTool was itself a mind, if cascades of self-improvement could fully automate away more and more of the intellectual labor performed by the outside world - then it would be a different story. But while the development path wends inexorably through thousands and millions of engineers, and you can't divert that path through an internal computer, you're not likely to pull far ahead of the world. You can just choose between giving your own people a 10% boost, or selling your product on the market to give lots of people a 10% boost.
You can have trade secrets, and sell only your services or products - many companies follow that business plan; any company that doesn't sell its source code does so. But this is just keeping one small advantage to yourself, and adding that as a cherry on top of the technological progress handed you by the outside world. It's not having more technological progress inside than outside.
If you're getting most of your technological progress handed to you - your resources not being sufficient to do it in-house - then you won't be able to apply your private productivity improvements to most of your actual velocity, since most of your actual velocity will come from outside your walls. If you only create 1% of the progress that you use, then a 50% improvement becomes a 0.5% improvement. The domain of potential recursion and potential cascades is much smaller, diminishing k. As if only 1% of the uranium generating your neutrons, were available for chain reactions to be fissioned further.
We don't live in a world that cares intensely about milking every increment o