6th
Scoble @SRI
It was awesome to welcome Robert back to SRI, and his headline makes an important, but subtle point:
The Coolest Tech Tour Ever: How SRI is Augmenting the Human Condition
Doug Engelbart was a key figure in SRI’s history, and a great leader.
His work was ultimately about a core goal of augmenting human ability — an idea that came alive in early SRI breakthroughs like the mouse, the GUI, hypertext and beyond.
Doug’s vision for AI was one that gave us prosthetics — not replacements. Siri speaks to this distinction well. Or, take the first down marker in football — it is the earliest commercialization of truly augmented reality, and a technology developed at SRI.
Augmentation always was and still is the higher purpose that drives the organization.
SRI focuses on real/usable and moreover practical AI — not fake/dream AI. And AI is just one area of research – the SRI augmentation theme spans surgery, drug discovery and therapeutics, robotics, software security, haptics, materials sciences, and more.
The point here is that whereas more showy efforts like IBM’s Watson really strive for a kind of technology that replaces a human, SRI is, again, focused on the Engelbart-ian tradition of extending, heightening, and exploring what human can be and do with technology at their side.
That’s a big distinction.
As someone who has spent a great deal of his career bringing non-trivial “augmentations” to market, I think it’s high time we remember that, despite all of the pop-cultural associations of technology that force us into the familliar machine vs. human dichotomy, the most interesting and productive innovations are those that help us do more with less.
Technologies that seek to replace or even replicate a human capability are considerably less interesting, both intellectually and practically.
I highly recommend watching all of Scoble’s videos if you have the time — you’ll leave re-enchanted with technology and the many great opportunities in front of us.
Disclosure: SRI is a client.
