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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I was terrified by the notion of 17k sent emails, and then I looked at my own… and I'm not even a "big email user"! Amazing how this flotsam accumulates.
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It feels not unlike a kind of nuclear waste?
A substance which induces irrational anxiety for some, but when welded by skilled operators can be reprocessed to power various engines of human flourishing.
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Ugh, I meant "wielded" not "welded".
Anyway, my point is that sending an email once only consumes a small fraction of its fissile material.
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