FOR AS LONG as machines have been around, people have rightfully questioned whether their effect on society was truly generative. The steam enginea, to the first literary generation of America, was an attack on the pastoral ideal. The factory, to Marx, was a jailer of the worker’s species-being. Man vs. machine. Pasture vs. industry. Community vs. isolation. This was the intellectual landscape of the machine well into the late twentieth century.
What's worth pausing on is that those warnings came when machines could only move things: coal, cloth, bodies. When it came time to build the first computers, pioneers like Doug Engelbart and Vannevar Bush were determined to resolve this tension rather than repeat it.
They were the first idealists who genuinely believed machine could be reconciled with man, if it was done carefully enough. For a while, their experiment went beautifully.
Throughout the fifties and sixties, the two thinkers and their proteges prolifically demoedB visions of the computer that augmented human collaboration in powerful new ways. So powerful that Engelbart compared his memex concept to the invention of written language itself: not just a new tool, but a new way of thinking.
But with such a tall task came a critical warning: this new tool could not be built with the same thinking as the machines that came before it. Give written language to a society and you get the Egyptian Kingdom. Give scripture to ordinary man and you get the Protestant Revolution. At the core of Engelbart’s 132-page SRI thesisC is a truth so simple it should have been non-negotiable: we shape our tools of thinking, and those tools of thinking then shape our thoughts.
Think about what that means applied to the most powerful thinking tool ever built — one with the potential to reach not just a culture or a field, but an entire civilization. This was the omen under which, sixty years ago, the modern computer was born.
Where did we go wrong?