Augmenting Human Intellect is prescient in so many ways that it's helpful as an exercise to examine predictions which seem off. Collecting notes…
#1 (p13-17): DE paints a vision of word processing, describes how it'd help people develop ideas more rapidly and flexibly. (cont)
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He suggests that in competitive spaces, there'd be strong market pressure to adopt and improve augmentations like this (the implication is those who don't would get left behind).
It's striking, then, that some of the most successful writers draft by hand, or on typewriter!
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If Gaiman, Rowling, Stephenson, Sontag, King, etc can succeed without non-linear text editing, then it seems that either a) the augmentation must not be *that* transformatively powerful; or b) competition among top authors isn't that fierce, so "inefficiencies" can be tolerated.
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#2 (p28): Imagine you had a dictionary in your pocket. "If it were so very easy to look things up, how would our vocabulary develop, how would our habits of exploring the intellectual domains of others shift, …how would our education system change…?"
Not that much, it seems!
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I can't prove this, of course. It's just my impression: instant and universal access to dictionaries does not seem to have transformed thought or prose appreciably. If I'd been stuck with a paper dictionary rather than a digital one, I don't think this would change much.
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Why might this be?
I do look things up more than when I had to use a paper dictionary as a kid. But this doesn't seem to matter that much. Maybe it's because I would have looked up anything "important" in a paper dictionary anyway?
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Even Wikipedia, a vastly more astonishing reference, doesn't seem to have quite changed the development of vocabulary, though it's fair to say that it has shifted (and in many ways dramatically improved) our "habits of exploring the intellectual domains of others."
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I think this one is anchored in a misunderstanding of language and vocabulary as something received forms books rather than an inherently social/interpersonal phenomenon. Consider what the internet has done for slang, memes, and so on, in this light…
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