Augmenting human intellect

What Hacker News says

1. olooneyJul 2026
   A brief chronology of the extended mind thesis:

   * Characteristica universalis, Leibniz (c. 1679) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

   * As We May Think, Vannevar Bush (1945) - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

   * Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Norbert Wiener (1948) - https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph-pdf/2254528/book_9...

   * An Introduction to Cybernetics, Ashby (1956) - https://ashby.info/Ashby-Introduction-to-Cybernetics.pdf

   * Man-Computer Symbiosis, J. C. R. Licklider, (1960) - https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

   * Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, by Douglas Engelbart (1962) - https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

   * Man and the Computer, John G. Kemeny - https://archive.org/details/mancomputerbyjoh0000john

   * The Extended Mind Thesis, Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) - https://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/clark-chalmers-1998.p...

   * The Dream Machine (2002) - https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell-Waldrop/dp/1...

   See also the Wikipedia article on "Intelligence Amplification", which gives a subset of the above list but also provides a great deal of context.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification

   I have these notes to hand because I've written about it in the context of the deep history of computer science:

   https://www.oranlooney.com/post/history-of-computing-2/#appe...

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2. kragenMar 2025
   Your comment doesn't seem relevant to my question.

   I'm familiar with that work, although I haven't finished reading Engelbart. Some of what I've written about these topics can be found at https://dercuano.github.io/topics/steps.html https://dercuano.github.io/topics/sketchpad.html https://dercuano.github.io/topics/smalltalk.html https://dercuano.github.io/topics/self-sustaining-systems.ht... https://dercuano.github.io/topics/small-is-beautiful.html https://dercuano.github.io/topics/hypertext.html

   You are likely to be particularly interested in my "Commentaries on reading Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect”", https://dercuano.github.io/notes/augmenting.html.

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3. rektideApr 2023
   Outlook is so important. Fostering oneself as a liberal[1], curious open excited person, who is in the lifelong school of learning, wanting to know more helps enormously.

   It creates enormous tension but letting in distrust of the corporate org, letting oneself believe in untapped possibilities all about us helps. The org is all to often slow, bad at adopting & amplifying individual insight & inspiration, but still the muses talk through us. More keeps shining through somehow. I think of the better worlds always coming through. "Go then, there are other world than these."

   We here in technology are so amazingly uninhibited, so free to fork or start new things, so ultra-well equipped to go venture wherever our minds might take us. To visit & connect to these other spaces.

   A huge part of of dreaming is having principles. Which often begets vision; it creates a "what if" mode in which to dream. One's principles are a habitat that shapes all of their experiences.

   I personally have been hugely inspired by Douglas Engelbart's conception of Augmenting Human Intellect: building not just better processes but seeing Computing as a broader tool for though, believing in a co-reinforcing constructionist human-computer symbiosis. Convceiving of computing as one of the highest most dynamic most malleable forms of holistic technology [2] aligns my thoughts, orients me towards a promising to me vision of computing, that opens lines of inquiry, where I want to pry in the cracks of the drab & dry industrialist world & spring forth new exciting human potentials, that hint at the grand and sweeping & vast potentials we are both so far from, and so very close to.

   [1] https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150

   [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...

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4. carapaceMar 2023
   You're not alone. I program for fun, mostly, and I'm completely uninterested in these talking computers. I'm a little wistful that my hobby has gone from a viable career path to just a hobby, but I believe the talking computers systems will write better software, so I can't be too sad, eh?

   Now that the machines can think and talk, the only real problem left (to a first approximation) is selection of the options they generate, as describe sixty years ago by Engelbart in his classic, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

   I'm going to repeat that because it's as important as it is counter-intuitive: the machines will think better than we can, so all [solvable] problems are solved except the problem of intelligence itself: "What is the best option?"

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5. carapaceMar 2023
   The open letter is so foolish it invalidates itself. For one thing, it's pouring fuel on the fire. The obvious reaction to such a letter is to accelerate and hide one's own progress, eh?

   Yudkowsky's fear-mongering about sci-fi Skynet is also unmoving to me (for metaphysical reasons I won't go into here) however, his position is at least logically consistent, as Aaronson points out.

   These machines can already talk and think better than many humans, and the ratio (of mentally sub-computer to super-computer humans) will only go up. Ergo, the only intellectual problem left is how to use them.

   I've been banging on about this for a couple of weeks now, so apologies to those who've seen it before, please read "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223 by Douglas C. Engelbart, October 1962 https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

   And then at least skim "An Introduction to Cybernetics" by W. Ross Ashby. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf The thing you're looking for is "intelligence amplifier". Engelbart references it, the book explains all the math you need to understand and build one.

   The next piece of the puzzle is something called "Neurolinguistic Programming" (you may have heard of it, some people will tell you it's pseudoscience, ignore those people, they mean well but they just don't know what they're talking about.) It turns out there's a rigorous repeatable psychology that more-or-less works. It's been under development for about half a century.

   The particular thing to look at is a specific algorithm called "Core Transformation Process" ( https://www.coretransformation.org/ ) which is kind of like the "Five Why's" technique but for the mind. It functions to reduce yak-shaving and harmonize intent.

   Anyway, the upshot of it all is that these machines can be made into automatic perfect therapists, using off-the-shelf technology.

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6. rektideJun 2022
   There were a couple threads of discussion in the recent Mother of All Demos submission[1], talking about Engelbart being not super well backed or supported.

   Maybe this goes too far to be palatable- even for a statement as push-us-forward as Long Term Research- but "Augmenting Human Intellect"[2] was certainly a vision for empowering us, for pushing us forward. Pre-AI singularity, Engelbart was envisioning instead that we make people (not machines) better and better. Yet he overall had very little backing in his life.

   [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31677027

   [2] https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/309/

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