4 ms·

Alan Kay chats / blogs / whatever-it-is-people-do-there a lot on Quora and the question "What would be the place of AI in Doug Engelbart's vision of 'Augmenting

Alan Kay chats / blogs / whatever-it-is-people-do-there a lot on Quora and the question "What would be the place of AI in Doug Engelbart's vision of 'Augmenting Human Intellect'? How can we reconsider things within current AI 'developments'?" recently came up. https://www.quora.com/What-would-be-the-place-of-AI-in-Doug-Engelbarts-vision-of-Augmenting-Human-Intellect-How-can-we-reconsider-things-within-current-AI-developments/answer/Alan-Kay-11 https://www.quora.com/What-would-be-the-place-of-AI-in-Doug-...

walterbell 2y ago
Thanks for the pointer, didn't know that Quora had threaded discussions. Excerpt from Alan Kay's answer: One big distinction in the 1962 time period is that they thought of “machine intelligence” as being a kind of complimentary set of thinking tools that could be “symbiotic” to how humans were able to think. They were not at all thinking about something like a slave or a major domo, but something more like a research assistant or a “Memex” (the latter was a big influence on Doug’s thinking). In the very late 60s the “official AI researchers” started to think that something like “intelligent Greek slaves” were needed for the “Romans” (Americans), and became rivals to Doug’s notion of elevating human thinking rather than just elevating power. This was a bad idea then … and it’s a bad idea today.
- justin66 2y ago
  The ACM has got a copy of Bush's Memex paper available, it's certainly worth a read for anyone who has not: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/227181.227186 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/227181.227186 It was interesting to see that Christopher Nolan featured Vannevar Bush prominently in the recent Oppenheimer film. Stripe press published some of his writings recently as well. (I haven't read this one yet) https://press.stripe.com/pieces-of-the-action https://press.stripe.com/pieces-of-the-action
  - walterbell 2y ago
    Thanks for the memex pointers. Since Alan Kay is posting LLM takes on Quora (OpenAI partner), his singular answers will likely be incorporated into ChatGPT :)

walterbell 2y ago

Thanks for the pointer, didn't know that Quora had threaded discussions. Excerpt from Alan Kay's answer: One big distinction in the 1962 time period is that they thought of “machine intelligence” as being a kind of complimentary set of thinking tools that could be “symbiotic” to how humans were able to think. They were not at all thinking about something like a slave or a major domo, but something more like a research assistant or a “Memex” (the latter was a big influence on Doug’s thinking). In the very late 60s the “official AI researchers” started to think that something like “intelligent Greek slaves” were needed for the “Romans” (Americans), and became rivals to Doug’s notion of elevating human thinking rather than just elevating power. This was a bad idea then … and it’s a bad idea today.

justin66 2y ago
The ACM has got a copy of Bush's Memex paper available, it's certainly worth a read for anyone who has not: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/227181.227186 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/227181.227186 It was interesting to see that Christopher Nolan featured Vannevar Bush prominently in the recent Oppenheimer film. Stripe press published some of his writings recently as well. (I haven't read this one yet) https://press.stripe.com/pieces-of-the-action https://press.stripe.com/pieces-of-the-action
- walterbell 2y ago
  Thanks for the memex pointers. Since Alan Kay is posting LLM takes on Quora (OpenAI partner), his singular answers will likely be incorporated into ChatGPT :)