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Pastimes : A New Era - Consider the Possibilities -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (54)	2/21/1998 2:22:00 AM
From: Barry Grossman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 272

Everybody, An interesting story. businessweek.com./premium/08/b3566141.htm THE LEGACY OF AN ETERNAL OPTIMIST Looking back on his 50-year career, Douglas C. Engelbart, 73, is a little sad that so much attention is given to what his inventions were--and so little to their purpose. The mouse, onscreen windows, groupware, videoconferencing, and the hypertext software that enables surfers to jump from link to link on the Web--all were conceived by Engelbart in the 1960s while he was with SRI International. Engelbart envisioned these inventions not as ends but as means to an end. They were supposed to be the tools that would help ordinary people harness digital technology and lift humanity to a new pinnacle of intelligence. He calls it augmented intelligence. ''The actual inventions were just sort of steps along the way,'' he says. For example, the hypertext links we see on the Web barely scratch the surface of what Engelbart foresaw decades ago. He wants to create links between vast libraries of thoughts and experiences. Today, only snippets of any one person's insights and intellect are preserved, and apart from the rich and famous, few people leave any lasting trace of the wisdom they attained. GLOBAL WISDOM? Digital technology can change that. For the first time, Engelbart argues, we have the means to extract, preserve, and organize the collective intelligence of entire populations--and make it available to anyone, now and in the future. Hypermedia, or multimedia systems with links joining images and sounds as well as text, and perhaps someday even mental states, would help people break out of their island prisons and evolve new forms of social organisms. ''This would be a tremendous breakthrough,'' Engelbart says, ''and profoundly change the way humans interact.'' This isn't just idealistic prattle. Engelbart fervently believes humanity is rapidly painting itself into a corner, with potentially dire consequences. ''Mankind is facing more and more complex challenges and problems,'' he explains, ''that entail more and more urgency.'' But we're still trying to cope using the same shopworn techniques, trusting a handful of leaders instead of marshaling the collective mental power of a community or continent. ''The market is really good at making products better and cheaper. But when it comes to bigger issues, like the environment, the market is not the machinery that's going to discover the combination of technology and organizational changes that will produce effective solutions. You can't blame the marketplace,'' Engelbart says. ''It wasn't chartered to figure out what's best for mankind. But it's important that society realize the market isn't always the best, or even a good, guide.'' Almost a decade ago, this eternal optimist and his daughter, Christina, founded the Bootstrap Institute in Fremont, Calif., to help companies better learn how to learn and thus augment their corporate intelligence. Last year, this spawned the Bootstrap Alliance--a program that archives knowledge as managers collaborate on trying to resolve common issues, such as the impediments that thwart total quality and human resource development. Alliance members include Sun Microsystems, NTT, and Netscape Communications. --------------------------- Barry