Ask HN: Who like Engelbart is ahead of their time now? With Doug Engelbart on the front page right now, it's a good time to ask: who (a person or team) is ahead of their time right now, that we'll look back decades later and see that they saw where things were headed? Almost by definition it can't be someone famous, and also it probably has to be someone who is doing things not just prognosticating. Who are some possibilities and what are they saying or doing? |
Software has kept iterating towards local maxima where the geeks do more and more and everyone else sees knows and does less and less. Computing is a rocket sled, but the whole world has gotten bigger and bigger and more ridiculous training wheels at every step. We are well served by data-keeps of loving grace, keeping us satisfied, while letting us know & understand nothing.
At some point, I think the general project of computing will come back about. We'll build more interesting environments for multiple systems of code and machines to run in. We'll have systems that users can shape, control, fork/clone, snapshot, inspect, observe. Port-based ideas like Node-RED but bigger and bolder. User-centric general-systems research will happen again, we'll tilt away from cloudy-mainframes, and back to a personal computing with actual people at the helm of their experiences again. And the Malleable Systems Collective are the people tracking this Engelbartian desire to Augment Intellect, to have a close loop of people and machines amplifying each other directly, not just being pandered down to by far off shitty services and alien intelligences.