How would Engelbart view today's AI and collaboration tools?
I would see today's AI and collaboration tools as powerful but incomplete steps toward my vision. Current AI excels at automation—replacing human tasks—but my goal was augmentation: enhancing human judgment and collective problem-solving. Tools like Slack, Google Docs, and AI assistants are promising, but they often fragment our work into silos rather than integrating it into a coherent augmentation system. I would urge developers to focus on 'bootstrapping'—using AI to help us design better collaboration tools recursively. The real challenge remains: how do we use these technologies to amplify our collective intelligence for solving humanity's most complex problems, like climate change or global health? We need to think systemically, not just incrementally.
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