(2012-09-28) Karabeg Engelbart Past And Future

Dino Karabeg on the past and future of Douglas Engelbart's work, provide Context for: The Club Of Zagreb is a creative redesign of The Club Of Rome where the ends are similar, but the means are entirely different.

In the 1970s when Doug’s project ran out of money, the entire team, excluding Doug himself, was hired by Xerox. The rest is history. (PARC)

Doug Engelbart saw this vision as early as in 1951; here is a recent description (recorded by Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg in their book “The Englebart Hypothesis”): “Many years ago, I dreamed that people were talking seriously about the potential of harnessing a technological and social nervous system to improve the IQ of our various organizations. What if, suddenly, in an evolutionary sense, we evolved a super new nervous system to upgrade our collective social organisms? Then I dreamed that we got strategic and began to form cooperative alliances of organizations, employing advanced networked computer tools and methods to develop and apply new collective knowledge.”

While Doug was developing the revolutionary new information technology in his lab at Stanford research Institute, in Menlo Park, across the bay, at U.C. Berkeley, Erich Jantsch was developing closely similar ideas within a distant yet no less novel research field — the study of ‘global issues,’ or ‘the world problematique’ as Jantsch and his colleagues named it... In 1980, the year when he died aged only 51, Jantsch published two books about the evolutionary paradigm in systems science. The insight that is most relevant for us is that Social System-s are Living System-s; what we need to make them work is not necessarily making sweeping structural interventions, even when those may seem necessary (like transplants of entirely different organs into a living organism, they would probably be rejected). a more reasonable strategy might be to simply enable the existing organisms to evolve, by adding very simple minute changes, which can then turn into very large ones... That is what The Game Changing Game is about.

Jantsch asked himself who, that is, what institution, should be counted on to take the remedial action. He concluded that the university must be the key to the answer... Jantsch foresaw an innovation workflow which: (1) starts from the systems laboratory, where the societal needs are received and the planning for systems that respond to those needs is done (2) missing pieces are commissioned from specialized technical laboratories which (3) make requests for basic research as needed. Notice that the flow of information is now opposite: ‘basic research’ does what it does; if the results happen to be recognized as useful by the technology producers, they will find application; if new technology happens to fit into the existing order of things, it will have a market. (College Education, MIT)

The Club Of Zagreb is the transdiscipline developed around The Game Changing Game as ‘the mother of all game-changing games.’

Punchline 4 is about Academic Research: Engelbart had undertaken to do exactly that what Jantsch, thinking logically, considered to be the core function of the university of the future. But the academic game being the familiar publishing game, it left little room for game changing.

Punchline 5 is about Entrepreneurship: Its systemic role is to engage people’s good work, creativity and courage to create new enterprises that are needed for the society. But as it is organized today (the proverbial couple of college dropouts working in a garage), entrepreneurship can only add things and services to the existing order of things — even when changing that order would be the true win both for the entrepreneur and the society! The Co Z fosters an approach to entrepreneurship where researchers and entrepreneurs play The Game-Changing Game collaboratively together. If they succeed, enormous possibilities for success and impact open up. In the Future Salon presentation we told about this from the point of view of Induct Software, a Norwegian company which is our corporate stakeholder: If we end up developing and ultimately embedding as common practice a new systemic solution for journalism and science, the market for the technology that enables that systemic solution will expand enormously.

Gradually, however, something resembling a grass-roots movement began to take shape around Engelbart’s work and person. Sam Hahn was among the first to join. Mei Lin Fung and Jack Park joined in a short while. Hahn, Fung and Park will be present at the Club of Zagreb opening. In 2008, parallel to another large anniversary celebration at Stanford University, Mei Lin Fung and a several other members of this group organized The Program For The Future conference, whose goal was not to celebrate Doug’s past achievements, but to continue his unfinished work.