Date: October,4,1962

I’ve just published my paper “Augmenting Human Intellect”. It's about the ways a computer could interact with people, instead of making computers as intelligent as people. It all started when I was in the Navy around 1944 on Leyte Gulf and I read Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article, “As We May Think,” where he envisioned the memex personal information system. The whole concept of helping people in that way excited me. The next event that led to my paper was that on the the day after my engagement, as I was driving to work, I realized I didn't have any more life goals. 

For the following two months I tried to find a worthy life goal. What struck me was that any effort to improve the world was complex. I thought about people who tried to fight malaria or increase food production in poorer areas but I found that solutions led to other issues such as overpopulation or soil erosion. To succeed at any ambitious project you had to assess all the intricate ramifications, weigh probabilities, share information, organize people, and more. 

Then one day it dawned on me that the complexity was the fundamental thing and if you could create something to help with the way humans handle complexity and difficulty, then that would be instantly helpful. A good way to accomplish that would be along what Bush said in his paper. I tried to imagine sitting in front of a big screen with all kinds of symbols and  operating all kinds of things to drive the computer. In the paper I stated that the intuitive talents of the human mind should be combined with an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human feel for a situation usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high power electronic aids.