Douglas C. Engelbart. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report AFOSR-3223 under Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project 3578 for Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Ca., October 1962.
By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to
approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his
particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in
this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid
comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree
of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier
solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to
problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we include
the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life
scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem
situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated
clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in
an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human
"feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined
terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic
aids.
..
Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but
the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency
with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the
increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity.
Augmenting man's intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full
pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach
and some plausible benefits.
..
This report covers the first phase of a program aimed at developing means to
augment the human intellect. These "means" can include many things--all of which
appear to be but extensions of means developed andused in the past to help man
apply his native sensory, mental, and motor capabilities--and we consider the
whole system of a human and his augmentation means as a proper field of search
for practical possibilities. It is a very important system to our society, and
like most systems its performance can best be improved by considering the whole
as a set of interacting components rather than by considering the components in
isolation.
..
This kind of system approach to human intellectual effectiveness does not
find a ready-made conceptual framework such as exists for established
disciplines. Before a research program can be designed to pursue such an
approach intelligently, so that practical benefits might be derived within a
reasonable time while also producing results of longrange significance, a
conceptual framework must be searched out--a framework that provides orientation
as to the important factors of the system, the relationships among these
factors, the types of change among the system factors that offer likely
improvements in performance, and the sort of research goals and methodology that
seem promising.
1
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In the first (search) phase of our program we have developed a conceptual
framework that seems satisfactory for the current needs of designing a research
phase. Section II contains the essence of this framework as derived from
several different ways of looking at the system made up of a human and his
intellect-augmentation means.
..
The process of developing this conceptual framework brought out a number of
significant realizations: that the intellectual effectiveness exercised today
by a given human has little likelihood of being intelligence limited--that
there are dozens of disciplines in engineering, mathematics, and the social,
life, and physical sciences that can contribute improvements to the system of
intellect-augmentation means; that any one such improvement can be expected to
trigger a chain of coordinating improvements; that until every one of these
disciplines comes to a standstill and we have exhausted all the improvement
possibilities we could glean from it, we can expect to continue to develop
improvements in this human-intellect system; that there is no particular reason
not to expect gains in personal intellectual effectiveness from a concerted
system oriented approach that compares to those made in personal geographic
mobility since horseback and sailboat days.
..
The picture of how one can view the possibilities for a systematic approach
to increasing human intellectual effectiveness, as put forth in Section II in
the sober and general terms of an initial basic analysis, does not seem to
convey all of the richness and promise that was stimulated by the development of
that picture. Consequently, Section III is intended to present some definite
images that illustrate meaningful possibilities deriveable from the conceptual
framework presented in Section II--and in a rather marked deviation from
ordinary technical writing, a good portion of Section III presents these images
in a fiction-dialogue style as a mechanism for transmitting a feeling for the
richness and promise of the possibilities in one region of the improvement
space" that is roughly mapped in Section II.
..
The style of Section III seems to make for easier reading. If Section II
begins to seem unrewardingly difficult, the reader may find it helpful to skip
from Section II-B directly to Section III. If it serves its purpose well enough,
Section III will provide a context within which the reader can go back and
finish Section II with less effort.
..
In Section IV (Research Recommendations) we present a general strategy for
pursuing research toward increasing human intellectual effectiveness. This
strategy evolved directly from the concepts presented in Sections II and III;
one of its important precepts is to pursue the quickest gains first, and use
the increased intellectual effectiveness thus derived to help pursue successive
gains. We see the quickest gains emerging from (1) giving the human the
minute-by-minute services of a digital computer equipped with computer-driven
cathode-ray-tube display, and (2) developing the new methods of thinking and
working that allow the human to capitalizeupon the computer's help. By this
same strategy, we recommend that an initial research effort develop a prototype
system of this sort aimed at increasing human effectiveness in the task of
computer programming.
..
To give the reader an initial orientation about what sort of thing this
computer-aided working system might be, we include below a short description of
a possible system of this sort. This illustrative example is not to be
considered a description of the actual system that will emerge from the
program. It is given only to show the general direction of the work, and is
clothed in fiction only to make it easier to visualize.
..
Let us consider an augmented architect at work. He sits at a working station
that has a visual display screen some three feet on a side; this is his working
surface, and is controlled by a computer (his "clerk" ) with which he can
communicate by means of a small keyboard and various other devices.
..
He is designing a building. He has already dreamed up several basic layouts
and structural forms, and is trying them out on the screen. The surveying data
for the layout he is working on now have already been entered, and he has just
coaxed the clerk to show him a perspective view of the steep hillside building
site with the roadway above, symbolic representations of the various trees that
are to remain on the lot, and the service tie points for the different
utilities. The view occupies the left two-thirds of the screen. With a
"pointer," he indicates two points of interest, moves his left hand rapidly
over the keyboard, and the distance and elevation between the points indicated
appear on the right- hand third of the screen.
..
Now he enters a reference line with his pointer, and the keyboard. Gradually
the screen begins to show the work he is doing--a neat excavation appears in
the hillside) revises itself slightly, and revises itself again. After a
moment, the architect changes the scene on the screen to an overhead plan view
of the site, still showing the excavation. A few minutes of study, and he
enters on the keyboard a list of items, checking each one as it appears on the
screen, to be studied later.
..
Ignoring the representation on the display, the architect next begins to
enter a series of specifications and data--a six-inch slab floor, twelve-inch
concrete walls eight feet high within the excavation, and so on. When he has
finished, the revised scene appears on the screen. A structure is taking shape.
He examines it, adjusts it, pauses long enough to ask for handbook or catalog
information from the clerk at various points, and readjusts accordingly. He
often recalls from the "clerk" his working lists of specifications and
considerations to refer to them, modify them, or add to them. These lists grow
into an evermore-detailed, interlinked structure, which represents the maturing
thought behind the actual design.
..
Prescribing different planes here and there, curved surfaces occasionally, and
moving the whole structure about five feet, he finally has the rough external
form of the building balanced nicely with the setting and he is assured that
this form is basically compatible with the materials to be used as well as with
the function of the building.
..
Now he begins to enter detailed information about the interior. Here the
capability of the clerk to show him any view he wants to examine (a slice of
the interior, or how the structure would look from the roadway above) is
important. He enters particular fixture designs, and examines them in a
particular room. He checks to make sure that sun glare from the windows will
not blind a driver on the roadway, and the "clerk" computes the information
that one window will reflect strongly onto the roadway between 6 and 6:30 on
midsummer mornings.
..
Next he begins a functional analysis. He has a list of the people who will
occupy this building, and the daily sequences of their activtites. The "clerk"
allows him to follow each in turn, examining how doors swing, where special
lighting might be needed. Finally he has the "clerk" combine all of these
sequences of activity to indicate spots where traffic is heavy in the building,
or where congestion might occur, and to determine what the severest drain on
the utilities is likely to be.
..
All of this information (the building design and its associated "thought
structure") can be stored on a tape to represent the design manual for the
building. Loading this tape into his own clerk, another architect, a builder,
or the client can maneuver within this design manual to pursue whatever details
or insights are of interest to him--and can append special notes that are
integrated into the design manual for his own or someone else's later benefit.
..
In such a future working relationship between human problem-solver and
computer 'clerk,' the capability of the computer for executing mathematical
processes would be used whenever it was needed. However, the computer has many
other capabilities for manipulating and displaying information that can be of
significant benefit to the human in nonmathematical processes of planning,
organizing, studying, etc. Every person who does his thinking with symbolized
concepts (whether in the form of the English language, pictographs, formal
logic, or mathematics) should be able to benefit significantly.
..
The objective of this study is to develop a conceptual framework within which could grow a coordinated research and development program whose goals would be the following: (1) to find the factors that limit the effectiveness of the individual's basic information-handling capabilities in meeting the various needs of society for problem solving in its most general sense; and (2) to develop new techniques, procedures, and systems that will better match these basic capabilities to the needs' problems, and progress of society. We have placed the following specifications on this framework:
