Together with Hiroshi Ishii of MIT’s Media Lab, I helped organize the Program for the Future , a conference held to honor Doug Engelbart on the 40th anniversary of “The Mother of All Demos”
Engelbart is known as the inventor of the mouse, but that innovation–as he frequently points out–was incidental to the much larger vision of collective intelligence. (Google for more details.)
Take a look at the video of the demo, and you will be amazed. Remember, the year was 1968!
Even though the current manifestations of that vision seem to be retarded relative to the foresight it showed 40 years ago, it is not difficult to make the leap to Amazon’s Kindle and all the on-line reading and writing options available to us today.
Book publishing as it has been practiced is in the midst of big changes.
