Augmenting human intellect: a design case against pure automation

augmenting human intellect when i started making software, i wasn’t dreaming of a factory. i loved that something on a screen could become an extension of my mind. a place to put a thought before i understood it. to move things around until new connections appeared. to make little systems that worked the way i worked, even if it made no sense to anyone else. the computer wasn’t interesting because it could do work without me. it was interesting because of what i could do with it. the early lineage of computing was built around this possibility. in 1962, Engelbart described augmenting human intellect as helping a person understand complex situations and find solutions that were previously out of reach. his starting point was the human being, not the autonomous machine. he wasn’t describing a faster black box. he was looking at the whole relationship between a person, their tools, their language, their methods, and what they could learn to do with them. the capability belonged to that whole system. somewhere along the way, we started telling a much smaller story about a much more powerful technology. more automation. more agents. more software producing more software. more…