Howard Rheingold
Our Featured Annotator interview series in the Engelbart Framework Annotation expedition continues with Howard Rheingold, whose work has been tremendously influential on me and many, many others who seek to understand the character and potential of the digital age. Howard’s epic Tools For Thought awakened me to depths in this story that I had only suspected before reading his account. Even more to the point, Howard’s work conveys and catalyzes insight on every page.
In this case, our Featured Annotator brings not only deep insights into Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, but also a remarkable personal history with that document and its author. As you will hear, Howard met Doug Engelbart not long after Doug’s Augmentation Research Center had ceased operations at SRI. Over many years and many conversations, Howard got to know Doug well, and he brings to this interview a stirring account of Doug as a human being and, as Howard puts it in Tools for Thought, a lonely long-distance thinker.
I have a head full of words, but I struggle to find the language I would need to describe the extent and importance of Howard’s contributions to the planetary conversation about how to build a better future together. He is merrily, definitely, and defiantly, an intellectual philanthropist.
I hope you enjoy the interview.
I posted this on YouTube:
4:12 Also his methodological intuitions and to be with the conspirators around this very notion in the first place.
8:53 Might be, but we lost most of his technological advances, plus, system theory remains theoretical, hence, all of our problems remain unsolved and only get worse by themselves.
9:08 System theory was not invented by Engelbart, it’s the practical application of it that makes his conceptual framework special. The theory, framework, concepts are still with us, we lost the application/implementation/practice of it.
10:24 There’s Michael Polanyi’s “Personal Knowledge”, at the very least, that’s 1958, and more of it from earlier times of course.
11:19 Sure, those are the tools I can actually use. I can’t use the abstract, intellectual understanding of what makes humans different from animals for any given task, it needs to be translated and applied to practice.
15:10 That’s probably true and very bad for Engelbart’s hope that we can improve exponentially.
27:41 I mean, what if you were tasked with solving complex, urgent problems back in the day or today, how would you go about it? 50 years later, what else could we imagine other than a system theory approach and building the tools to support it?
28:36 Of course not. Computer science is about algorithms and a theoretical category of problems, not about programming (the practice) or building tools or doing things with it, it’s the scientific analysis of the theory of programming, the theory of computers, etc.
39:00 But we could have arrived at the Enterprise by now. Your car is my buggy, I want my car now.
42:13 Bootstrapping has always been about procedures/practices as well, not to just go along with the tools, but tools and practices/methodology/paradigms supporting each other for synergy and (exponential) improvement.
42:33 That’s not what Guttenberg had in mind. Same with Engelbart, just in a different way. Also, books/literacy becoming available to more people than just the elite is a matter/question of efficiency.