doug engelbart requires no introduction. his 1968 demo is legendary, and here is to hoping he can teach us young upstarts some tricks to bootstrap. doug moved to the bay area in 1948 and had a life-changing epiphany that he had no goals in his career. so he settled on a goal to maximize his contribution to mankind. his goal: to boost mankind’s collective ability for coping with complex, urgent problems. at the time, there were 3 computers in the US. Doug starts talking about CODIAK capabilities, for Concurrent Development, Integration, and Application of Knowledge. he asserts that human cognitive abilities depend on their augmentation system. for each tool system, a human system is changed: Media vs Perception, Portrayal vs Organization etc. Their original system had a steep learning curve because it focussed on concepts such as transposing and groups while traditional office automation called for howto-like, step by step instructions. scaling of augmentation is a whole science to itself: Dimensionality Numbers. The example doug used was that if you were a 1000x heavier you would not be 1000x stronger, but only 100x because strength scales differently. Which would be the same as having a 10% of your strength with your current weight 🙂 Doug also mentions a sample of the increasing complexity of world problems: The State of the Future which appears every year. (2004 report) A definition of bootstrapping: “Pursue the capabilities that increase the capabilities to pursue.”

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