Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

In his conceptual framework for augmenting human intellect, Doug Engelbart posed the question of whom to augment first. His unsurprising conclusion was that computer programmers should be at the head of the line—specifically, those working on human augmentation, because the more they self-augmented, the faster they could produce further augmentations. They are “developing better tools for a class to which they themselves belong,” he wrote.13 (Engelbart saw this cycle as obviously virtuous, but today’s reader can detect other possibilities.)