As one of my favorite books, I'm overdue for a re-read, but Waldrop's Dream Machines is a book about J.C.R. Licklider, but Engelbart definitely comes up again a

As one of my favorite books, I'm overdue for a re-read, but Waldrop's Dream Machines is a book about J.C.R. Licklider, but Engelbart definitely comes up again and again, and for sure, the Augmenting Human Intellect thread is highly present. At least we no longer reduce Engelbart to "the man who invented the mouse." But yeah, the not-exactly philosophical but big-idea-ed-ness, the frame-setting that folks had is such a valuable contribution. Engelbart had such a clear & sharp objective in mind, that he wrote about so early, & it's so compelling & humanistic a value. Few other examples of tech-workers across the decades seem to radiate with the clear moral & progressive clarity. Thank you for this call out. This idea, of whether computers are here to mechanize processes that people fit into, or whether computers are tools to augment & enhance our individual agency, is a huge question. Ursala Franklin has some good material on Technological Society. There's a couple different points of view she proposes, but I really enjoy the distinction she makes between Holistic technologies, where the capabilities of the user are expanded & opened, the user gains control, versus Prescriptive technologies, which relate more to macro-level control, to enforcing set-down processes[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_prescriptive_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...