Conan Xin

augmenting human intellect when i started making software, i wasn’t dreaming of a factory. i loved that something on a screen could become an extension of my mind. a place to put a thought before i understood it. to move things around until new connections appeared. to make little systems that worked the way i worked, even if it made no sense to anyone else. the computer wasn’t interesting because it could do work without me. it was interesting because of what i could do with it. the early lineage of computing was built around this possibility. in 1962, Engelbart described augmenting human intellect as helping a person understand complex situations and find solutions that were previously out of reach. his starting point was the human being, not the autonomous machine. he wasn’t describing a faster black box. he was looking at the whole relationship between a person, their tools, their language, their methods, and what they could learn to do with them. the capability belonged to that whole system. somewhere along the way, we started telling a much smaller story about a much more powerful technology. more automation. more agents. more software producing more software. more output from fewer people. more growth. more numbers to prove that something is happening. and less attention to the person any of this is supposed to be for. i don’t want to pretend computing had a pure innocent beginning. replacing human labor was one of its ambitions. even in 1960, Licklider distinguished human-computer symbiosis from systems where the remaining people mainly served the machine. he wanted computers to participate in the formation of ideas, not only execute problems already defined. that distinction feels important – does the system help you discover what you mean? or does it only want you to submit a request, and wait outside while it works? sometimes waiting is exactly what i want. please do the search. move the files. take away the repetitive work. but not everything difficult is overhead. sometimes moving the pieces around is how you understand them. sometimes making the thing changes what you wanted to make. sometimes you need to see the wrong version, touch it, take it apart, and discover a better question. i want tools that leave room for that relationship. in his 1981 paper on Smalltalk, Ingalls described a system meant to support everyone’s creative spirit. personal mastery mattered: an individual should be able to comprehend the system, rather than remain dependent on something permanently beyond their reach. he also argued that computer models should fit the human mind, rather than demand the reverse. not one perfect workflow for everyone. systems that different people can inhabit differently. someone who thinks through pictures. someone who needs to write. someone who understands a problem by building a simulation. someone whose way of organizing their life doesn’t resemble a SaaS dashboard. a system you can reshape as your understanding changes. this is what i want AI to make possible. not just pumping out software, but having a living relationship with it. being able to ask why something works this way. change one part without surrendering the rest. see what happened. undo it. learn enough to make the next change yourself. the machine can become more capable without making the person smaller. but that won’t happen just because we make the models better. we have to care about it. design for it. notice when we are making someone more dependent while calling it empowerment. i don’t want to measure the future only by how much work happens without us. i want to know what becomes possible for the person who couldn’t participate before. what can they understand now? what can they express? what can they change without asking permission? when i say augmenting human intellect, that is what i mean. not a world that no longer needs us. a world we have more ability to shape.