Everything is a Copy of a Copy

Human progress moves incrementally. The ancient Greeks carved vertical flutings into their marble columns, a technique borrowed from older times when columns were made from wood, to hide joints and imperfections. Neoclassical architecture copied the pattern of fluted marble into concrete. The materials improved, but the design stayed the same. 

It was not until the 20th century that architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, and Le Corbusier realized the medium of steel, concrete, and glass enabled a whole new method of creation; giving birth to such Modernist marvels as The Guggenheim Museum, Cite Radieuse, and Fallingwater.

The Computing Industry has followed a similar path. In the 1990’s, most people were introduced to their first computer at work, where Microsoft’s suite of productivity tools had a de-facto monopoly. Both Word and Excel were simulacrums of the physical paper and pen paradigm that had defined office work for centuries. Computer hard drives were organized by “folders”, mimicking physical filing cabinets.

In the latter 2000’s, Google released their own suite of work tools: Docs, Sheets, and Slides, which replicated Word, Excel, and Powerpoint for the internet age. The big improvement was that these tools made it easy to share and collaborate on documents with colleagues. But the way people thought about their work, and went about producing it, hadn’t fundamentally changed.

It Wasn’t Supposed To Be Like This

Early Information Technology pioneers viewed the computer as an extension of the human mind. It was not only a tool for organizing and sending information, but also for producing original knowledge. Computers would enable us to think more clearly and accurately, enhancing individual intelligence beyond the capacities of our biological brains.

In a 1945 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush published an article titled “As We May Think.” In the article, Bush describes a system he dubbed the “Memex”: a personal collection of written materials connected by links that closely mirrors the associative processes of the human mind. These “associative trails” posited by Bush are credited as the inspiration for Ted Nelson’s groundbreaking work in hypertext, the fundamental technology that underpins the World Wide Web. Essentially, the global memory that is the Internet of today was originally conceived to be a personal memory aid, tailored to the individual.

The Memex also influenced Douglas Englebart, who used a collection of notch-edged cards to partially implement the system Bush described. Engelbart founded the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute, with the mission of using computers to amplify human intelligence. Englebart and his team would go on to give the “Mother of All Demos” in 1968, in which he demonstrated almost all of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing, such as windows, video conferencing, the computer mouse, and collaborative real-time editing.

Perhaps the most famous proponent of the computer as a tool for enhancing human intellect is Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs. In a 1990 interview Jobs describes a study which compared the efficiency of locomotion for various species on planet Earth. The Condor came in at the top of the list, while human beings came in about ⅓ of the way down. However, a human on a bicycle blew all the other species away. The computer, says Jobs, is a “bicycle for the mind”.

Returning to the Roots

Early Information Technology pioneers clearly understood that the personal computer was a brand new medium, which would enable methods of work and creation that were previously unfathomable. This insight seemed to be lost in the 90’s and 2000’s when we were busy replicating old ways of knowledge production. But a new breed of apps is reviving the vision of software as augmented intelligence.

Notion

Notion is a company that sees themselves as direct descendants of visionaries like Alan Kay, Douglas Englebart, and Ted Nelson. Their mission is to “make it possible for everyone to shape the tools that shape their lives.” They accomplish this with an all-in-one workspace that supports notes, tasks, documents, and wikis.

The magic of Notion is that it decouples your data from the way it is displayed. There is a single database that underlies the various views, so you can display the same information as a list, table, Kanban board, or calendar, and toggle between these views at will. Notion has a robust permissioning system, so you can leave comments on a page for your team, or publish a public document, effectively deploying a web page without writing any code.

Airtable

Notion is part of a growing trend of “No-Code” or “Low-Code” apps that empower non-technical users to create powerful business workflows. The dominant business No-Code software at the moment is Airtable, a spreadsheet app with a built-in database. As of writing, Airtable is used by over 90,000 organizations worldwide. Their stated mission is to democratize software creation, “arguably the most creative medium of the last century.”

Airtable allows teams to build custom workflows to organize their work. While the interface is as simple as a spreadsheet, because the data is being stored in a database behind the scenes, users across the organization can interact with the same data in multiple interfaces. Airtable also features “blocks,” which are pre-packaged miniature apps that users can drop into a workflow for further automation.

Mural

Airtable is a spreadsheet that is powerful enough to replace your back office, while Notion does away with clutter by allowing you to create any kind of document from a single application. However both apps mainly adhere to the paradigm of text and numbers inside of rows and columns that has defined business documents since the days of pen and paper.

Mural is an app that breaks away from the document paradigm, with an online, collaborative whiteboard. Mural helps teams solve problems visually, which is much closer to the way humans think when approaching a novel situation. Users can add sticky notes, arrows, comments and sketches to a shared virtual workspace, and changes are reflected to other teammates in real time.

Coaching Networks

The apps mentioned above help users organize and share information. A Coaching Network is an altogether different type of system that exists at the frontier of human-computer interaction. It goes beyond simply moving information around, to actually helping the user create new knowledge.

I describe Coaching Networks in detail here, but the idea is straightforward:

1 – Sensors passively gather user data in a given domain (ie text and speech)

2 – Data collected from multiple users is combined to train a Machine Learning model of the domain

3 – Users are coached with just-in-time, tailored feedback as they perform tasks

4 – Inputs from the highest performers in the network improve the skills of all connected users

Coaching Networks are the fullest realization to date of the vision of “human-computer symbiosis”. As the economy becomes increasingly automated, and strong Artificial Intelligence looms on the horizon, enhancing our own intelligence may be the only way for modern knowledge workers to keep pace with our machine counterparts. 

Grammarly

Grammarly is perhaps the most ubiquitous Coaching Network in use today. Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant, packaged as a browser plug-in so that it is available anywhere users write on the internet. Not only does Grammarly catch spelling and grammar errors, its Natural Language Processing algorithms make intelligent suggestions to improve clarity, style and tone.

Every time a user enters text using Grammarly, and accepts or rejects a suggestion, this data gets fed back into the system to improve the Machine Learning algorithms. This is the power of a Coaching Network: with each use the network becomes more intelligent and valuable to future users.

Augmented Intelligence

While the popular media is enthralled with Artificial Intelligence, a new breed of workplace productivity tools are quietly revolutionizing the way we think and work. Rather than outsourcing all of our thinking to machines, these tools place human ingenuity and intention at the center, and view machines as a means to extend and enlarge our own capabilities and creativity. 

We may yet see the realization of Englebart’s vision: “A way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human feel for a situation usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.”