(2025-10-04) Bernstein What Is It Like To Be Augmented

Mark Bernstein: What is it like to be augmented?

Abstract

Douglas Engelbart’s proposal for “Augmenting Human Intellect” envisioned innovation in personal workstations, organizational management, and social organization in order to tackle society’s most intractable problems (grand challenge). Recent thinking about animal cognition and in the philosophy of the mind leads to intriguing speculation about the experience of augmentation.

From the opening of his original 1962 proposal for “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” Doug Engelbart envisioned hypertext workstations as a central component of his plan to expand human capacity to solve complex problems [28]. This goal of augmentation, encompassing improvement to social systems as well as development of tools, remained a prominent ambition throughout Engelbart’s career and it continues to inspire his followers

In Engelbart’s writing, the focus of augmentation is always on the goal: the solution of urgent but intractable problems by a team of men1 collaborating through networked workstations.

Augmentation aims to facilitate group performance to surpass what a talented individual could accomplish (collaborationware). The then-recent precedents of war cabinets and the Manhattan Project [49] are clearly implied. One explicit aim of augmentation was the establishment of a virtuous cycle in which better tools and practices could be turned on augmentation itself to give rise to still greater improvement in human capability. The dynamics of this process and the prominent place of social as well as technical considerations were treated in detail, but the experience of the augmented participant was seldom discussed.

This stands in contrast to the work of Engelbart’s contemporary, Ted Nelson. For Nelson, the focus is invariably on personal experience and on the ways that computers could make people better [58]. The reason “you can and must understand computers now” — the subtitle of Nelson’s Computer Lib — is that understanding computers will lead to personal growth, understanding and enlightenment

Nelson is always writing about what it will be like to use “literary machines,” while Engelbart is chiefly concerned with iterative refinement of the tools.

This note proposes to redress this imbalance and to ask, “What would it feel like to be among the augmented?” The best answer would be to build Engelbart’s toolkit and its accompanying social systems and then to ask people about the experience, but this has (thus far) eluded us. We might begin, instead, by reviewing current thought about the experience of cognition

A good deal of the reaction to Engelbart’s vision appeared in the form of speculative fiction, starting with a NASA report written by Vernor Vinge [57 - The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era], and we turn next to glance at that literature.

experience of animals, however, is a challenge, because some animals sometimes act as if they have minds, but animals never act or speak as people do [13]. The study of animal cognition has made considerable progress in this century, driven in part by better understanding of genetics and of neurological structures, and also by more precise thinking about thought

We should not imagine animals as being human minds (or childlike minds) embedded in different bodies. Nor is mindfulness a simple linear scale: different animals are mindful in different ways

Early 20th-century positivism (of which Computer Science itself is an offshoot [10]) held that we can, in the end, know only what we can perceive (such as the taste of coffee) and what we can deduce (such as first-order logic)

The sensorium or umwelt is often seen as necessary for sentience, because by sensing the external world we distinguish it from ourselves. Of course, different animals have very different sensoria: bats have sonar, birds see ultra-violet light, and the arms of octopuses taste, smell, and sense light [35, ch.4]. Nor is the sensorium determinative, since people who are deaf or blind are still people

Indeed, the purpose of sentience is far from clear; what evolutionary advantage do we gain from our ability to do number theory or discuss psychiatry [34]?

Recent studies of cephalopod (octopuses and cuttlefish) cognition provide an interesting example

Octopuses, on the other hand, are very remote from us

The experience of being an octopus must be quite unlike our own: a large portion of the octopus’s neurons are found in its arms rather than its brains, and it may be the case that the octopus brain sends requests to an arm but then must to keep an eye out to see what the arm decides to do [51]. Yet octopuses act in ways that certainly suggest forms of experience; they recognize different people, squirt water at people they dislike, and can short-circuit the lighting in the rooms where their tanks are kept if the lights annoy them

Our efforts to test their problem solving are sometimes confounded by octopus personality. An octopus may never attain a goal of 80% correct answers because individuals become bored, or decide to double-check that the “wrong” choice is in fact permanently wrong

Prosthetics and Extended Minds One important line of inquiry has been the extended mind hypothesis [20]. Clark and Chalmers argue that:
if, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process.

If we count a flock of sheep mentally, that is certainly a cognitive task. If we count on our fingers, we ourselves are still doing the thinking. Clark and Chalmers hold that, if we always carry a small notebook and tally the sheep on its pages, the notebook becomes part of our thinking — an extension of the mind.

Though the Memex (“Memory Extender”) is what we remember from Bush’s “As We May Think” [16], much of that essay concerns the use of inexpensive and unobtrusive photography to help scientists record data more thoroughly than even the laboratory notebook allowed.

Clark and Chalmers propose to extend the sphere of cognition to include devices that are “reliably accessible.” In antiquity, this included slaves who, like Cicero’s secretary Tiro, were in constant attendance on their owners, kept track of appointments, handled tenants, and maintained records

with some 7 billion smart phones in use, a majority of the human population might be regarded as augmented

These devices are not only useful for jotting notes or checking facts, but also extend our senses in interesting ways. For example, one can walk through a park in an unfamiliar city in the confident knowledge that a moment’s glance will reveal your current location and the direction of your hotel.

Finally, we may mention literal prostheses. My hearing is very poor, but with the assistance of hearing aids I am frequently unaware of the deficit.

Augmentation in Fiction Though the research literature on the experience of augmentation is thin, the topic has been of considerable interest to fantastika. If taking fiction seriously appears to be a leap, consider that a substantial portion of Engelbart’s 1962 proposal was itself couched as an imaginary presentation, with imagined objections and discussion

A number of writers have wrestled with the intractable3 problem of the experience of the augmented. Even in antiquity, writers recognized that a superhuman intelligence might have little to say to, and scant reason to care about, mere humans, and that their concerns might well strike us as arbitrary, inscrutable, or trivial

Augmentation means leaving behind a former state, one in which humanness can seem Edenic. A number of profiles of the augmented, notably “Flowers for Algernon”[46], anticipate that augmentation will be transient and that we can (or should) return to innocence (against which see [32] and perhaps [18]). A countervailing opinion holds that, since medicine makes cyborgs of us all, we might as well embrace our posthumanity

An important strand in recent fantastika begins with Vernor Vinge’s critique of the Engelbart project [57]. Where Engelbart foresaw a virtuous cycle of improvement, Vinge predicted that augmentation would pursue ever-faster iterations culminating in a singularity where everything changes and in which humanity will be superseded [79]. This specter of transcendence and/or extinction was taken up by Stross [74, 75] and Gibson[33], and has come to be understood as implicit in any consideration of augmentation.

Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem [15] is portentous for the augmented. First, it is provably impossible to anticipate every consequence of augmentation; there are more true statements than proofs.

Engelbart did anticipate that augmentation in an organization would give rise to shocks, that the radical change in the scale of Tool System capability - in speed, function, capacity, presentation quality, transmission, etc. of emergent digital technology - greatly transcends any other perturbation in system parameters that our organizations have ever needed to adapt to in so short a time as a few decades. [30]
Such disruption is particularly threatening to large institutions

The augmented leadership may be correct in their proposals, but those proposals will surely upset a lot of apple carts [39, 70]. This might lead the augmented to spend undesirable amounts of time and attention on political defense4, much as society decided to spend the productivity gains incurred by the adoption of desktop publishing on better typography in management reports.

Finally, we must remember that, for Engelbart, augmentation is a fundamentally social process carried out by a work group, and that part of that which is to be augmented lies in the social realm of working relationships.

Engelbart seems to have made little provision for disagreement among the augmented, perhaps assuming that the facts would always prevail

For convenience, I will refer to people outside the circle of bootstrapped augmentation as “basic humans” or Basics.

Analogies to our current plight will doubtless occur to the reader. “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep” describes a last-ditch effort to suppress replicants who are stronger, more intelligent, and more virtuous than wildtype humans

The economic shock of augmentation might well leave those without augmentation in the metaphoric or literal dust[30, 81]. Moreover, the fact of augmentation itself would create social and political divisions between the Augmented and the Basic. They could no longer play chess together, or speculate on commodities, or argue about Manchester United

Are We There Yet?

Perhaps we are already augmented, using technology to increase our intellectual abilities. If so, we know the answer to the question this paper poses: what it feels like to be augmented is simply what it feels like to be ourselves.

We know a surprising amount about the development of writing in the city of Uruk around 3200 BCE5, and about the difficulty of symbol manipulation performed by inexperienced hands in the intractable medium of damp clay [64, 66]. Early students of the art of writing complained bitterly of the difficulty of learning a vast number of arcane symbols denoting necessary things like commodities, professions, omens, and amounts.