Doug Engelbart - The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ (1968-95)

Doug Engelbart - The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ (1968-95)

1) 1995 Vannevar Bush Symposium, Tape 2 - Doug Engelbart

"The Strategic Pursuit of Collective IQ" - Doug Engelbart's presentation at the The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium in 1995, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bush's groundbreaking article "As We May Think". Introduced by host and long-time friend Andy van Dam, Doug recounts his discovery of Vannevar's work, briefly describes the unfolding of his own work and what's next using his Bootstrap "Paradigm Map", and shares his wish that, had he only known that Vannevar was still alive in 1968, he would have sent him the film of his 1968 demo. See Doug's Abstract and Bio for this talk. Presentation: 50 minutes; Q&A 10 minutes.

2) Doug's 1968 Demo

On December 9th, 1968 Doug Engelbart appeared on stage at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco to give his slated presentation, titled "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect" and spent the next 90 minutes not only telling about his work, but demonstrating it live to a spellbound audience that filled the hall. Instead of standing at a podium, he was seated at a custom designed console, where he drove his presentation through his NLS computer residing 30 miles away in his research lab at Stanford Research Institute, onto a large projection screen overhead, flipping seamlessly between his presentation outline and live demo of features, while video teleconferencing members of his research lab linking in from SRI in shared screen mode to demonstrate more of the system.

comment: This may look outdated but remember this was in 1968. This was a groundbreaking demonstration making history. Doug even uses a mouse, yes a MOUSE! What they're doing right now we will be told in 2054. GOD is the Supreme Form of collective IQ - anything else is just a shadow. This demo makes you think of Timothy Leary: What Timothy has done for LSD, Dough has done for information technology. Some visionaries have been taken seriously and some haven't. Some visionaries haven't been taken seriously by society, by the collective of society. Some visionaries haven't been taken seriously by society's collective IQ. Maybe society's collective IQ wasn't high enough. Maybe Timothy Leary has made it somewhat HIGHER. Maybe intelligence is the only thing that will save humanity and therefore methods for improving collective intelligence are methods for humanity's survival. All problems have been caused by the mind and where there is the cause the solution may be found too. But how do we define intelligence?

:wave: