I was surprised to learn that Douglas Engelbart was the inventor of the mouse, the word processor and the hyperlink. I was not surprised, then, to read about Engelbart’s thoughts on Augmenting Human Intellect. The mouse, the word processor and even the hyperlink all seem to accomplish Engelbart’s ultimate goal of making the human language more economical. The mouse eliminates the need for computer users to enter in complex and confusing command codes, the word processor fractionalizes the amount of time used in writing and the hyperlink instantaneously takes an internet user to a desired web location. One section of his essay that was particularly interesting to me, probably because it was a large image in a sea of text, was the depictions of time spent writing the sentence, “Augmentation is fundamentally a matter of organization.” The ability to type out words has, essentially, augmented human intellect. Instead of wasting upwards of 40 seconds writing the sentence the body is able to outsource some of its power and become more economical.
Engelbart
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