Douglas Adams wrote a documentary in 1990...

[Darren Dirt]

...which basically predicted today's WWW!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperland

part history lesson, part technology prototype demos, part speculation -- all this before the widespread usage and/or public "release" of HyperText and the first Web Browser!


Oh did I mention the personification of the "Software Agent" is played by... Four!?



Can be found on the Web (!whoa*!) @ http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hyperland+douglas+adams




*as predicted on IMDB over 4 years ago!

[Mr. Analog]

I haven't thought about hyperland in ages! I assume this is linked to the multi-dimensional stuff you were looking at earlier?

[Darren Dirt]

I haven't thought about hyperland in ages!

...which basically predicted today's WWW!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperland

part history lesson

If you've seen it, how much detail does it go into re. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos ( <-- mega-WHOA! )

I assume this is linked to the multi-dimensional stuff you were looking at earlier?

...somehow... #sheepish

[Mr. Analog]

It's funny because I've made that connection before as well (probably the last time I saw the old "flatland" flash video thing way back whenever.)

[Darren Dirt]

It's funny because I've made that connection before as well (probably the last time I saw the old "flatland" flash video thing way back whenever.)

You know, if one of us wins the lottery I say we take a one-year sabbatical from The Industry and join forces with The Doug Engelbart Institute and see what happens when unbounded curiosity and creativity and tenacity come together... After 4 decades I realize and gotta concede that I'm simply a problem solver at the core, everything else is just details and/or obstacles.

[Mr. Analog]

I'm a creative type as well, the trouble has been motivation sometimes haha

[Darren Dirt]

Maybe motivation isn't the problem, maybe at a fundamental level you know to avoid inefficiencies, it gets frustrating to get deep into Making Something Different Happen only to be interrupted or held back or be made stuck in [insert any of countless obstacles here]. See below*

Stuff is happening quickly but is a big fat mess, some of us have experienced it first-hand on a micro-scale :cough: but a kind of animated disorganized inefficient chaos seems apparent on a macro scale too ... Perhaps an ambitious "new" vision is needed, and in this generation perhaps the growing pains of an increasingly information-dependent society might finally drive a more wide-spread acceptance of this kind of strategy; truly this era is when humanity needs to raise our "Collective IQ" while we still can?


*

Doug Engelbart's first big strategic breakthrough was realizing that effective vs. ineffective vs. brilliantly effective capability was a factor of the individuals' innate abilities plus the Augmentation System they employed. Therefore, to improve their capability, your biggest opportunity is to look at their whole Augmentation System for what to improve.

...Engelbart's second big breakthrough: To foster rapid, dramatic improvements throughout the whole Augmentation System, rather than letting co-evolution take its course in a meandering way, he must figure out a way to accelerate the co-evolution process pro-actively.

Doug Engelbart saw the opportunity to radically improve the effectiveness of intellectual problem solvers by continuously reinventing their Augmentation Systems, accelerating the human-tool co-evolution, using his own research team as the first subject group. He would start small and build on results, targeting both the Tool and the Human Systems at once, since it didn't make sense to make big changes in one without considering corresponding changes in the other.

Of the two, Engelbart saw the Human System to be a much larger challenge than the Tool System, much more unwieldy and staunchly resistant to change, and all the more critical to change because, on the whole, the Human System tended to be self-limiting, and the biggest gating factor in the whole equation. It's hard for people to step outside their comfort zone and think outside the box, and harder still to think outside whatever paradigm or world view they occupy. Those who think that the world is flat, and science and inquiry are blasphemous, will not consider exploring beyond the edges, and will silence great thinkers like Socrates and Gallileo...

More than 60 years ago, Engelbart could foresee that "the big question would be, what could be done to help intellectual problem-solvers become exponentially more capable and effective at solving important problems/, sooner rather than later? In fact every year sooner could make a huge difference in number of lives saved, amount of suffering relieved, and quality of lives improved."
I want to be a part of this global problem-solving movement. Even if it is relatively un-noticed by the masses and mainstream right now. Think what a world Engelbart was living in during the 1950s and 1960s, and how much the culture has shifted in a relatively short time. Because he believed it could, and should -- nay, must.