Doug Engelbart gave one of the keynotes at ISDE5. Doug is originally from Oregon but has been in the Bay area most of his working life. In 2000 he was awarded the National Medal of Technology for his technological achievements, including the invention of the computer mouse. For two decades he pursued his technological goals as Director of his Augmentation Research Center of Stanford Research International (SRI). But Doug’s lifelong dream has been to figure out a way to help society to improve its ability to successfully cope with complex and urgent problems and that is what he talked about at ISDE5.
Doug’s perspective is that Earth is a complex place with pressing “problems of a global scale and the rate, scale, and complex
nature of change is unprecedented and beyond the capability of any one
person,
organization, or even nation to comprehend and respond to.” Challenges of this scale require a
cooperative cross-disciplinary, international approach. The big challenge is to boost
what Doug calls the collective IQ of organizations and the world. He believes that we need new infrastructure to support this endeavour. Doug encapsulates this by saying that “books are obsolete” (ironically in a keynote to the American Library Association) and that we need to build instead a dynamic knowledge repository (DKR) and other new tools. Doug continues to be active in research. He founded the Bootstrap Institute to further the concept of finding new ways to help humanity cope with complex problems. He is also active in the Millennium Project. Very impressive for anyone, but especially for an 82 year old.
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