Augmentation

Brief sketch: The human augmentation program from ARPA (now DARPA) got its start when J.C.R Licklider got the notion that the nation could not wait for AI to make all its promised advances, and funded Douglas Engelbart to study how to use what we have to augment human capabilities.

Engelbart and his SRI team authored a paper, published in 1962, which predicted the internet and Microsoft office - by which I mean, it predicted that systems like those would come into play.

In 1968, the The Mother of all demos was presented, which used a video monitor with bit-mapped display to show Doug and Bill English collaboratively editing a document, with a video of Bill showing - not unlike Zoom today - with a keyboard, mouse, and a cording keyboard (5-fingers). In that day, the internet as we know it did not exist.

Doug did that work in what is now called the AI Lab at SRI International. His work was aimed at augmenting human capabilities.

More important than the invention of a mouse and bit-mapped video display was Doug's grand idea:

Stated simply: Human systems and their tool systems must co-evolve to raise what he called a "capabilities infrastructure" to handle ever more complex and urgent problems.

He further argued for NICS - Networked Improvement Communities. IEEE, ACM, and others come to mind as NICS.