Towards Computing-Augmented Imagination

Intelligence and intellect have been historically the human capability the most associated with computers. "Augmenting human intellect" as Douglas Engelbart says, to solve "complex situations" for "diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers". "Computers are smart", "computers are thinking", "computers will make us think better, faster, etcetera", all aphorisms that have surrounded the personal computer since it became popular in the '80s.

But I believe imagination is what humans, as individuals, and society, ultimately need. Imagination not as fantasy, but as the capacity to hold images in our head, to hold realities across space and time that are far from our immediate reality. Imagination as the capacity to imagine what world we want, and then build it.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University, has done research on how chimpanzees can show traits of extremely good short term memory, almost savant-like. When presented with flashing cards, and then these turned hidden, they can immediately recall them, in a blink. Matsuzawa believes that this trait is very crucial in the jungle, when you need to recall your environment in real time, and when it's a matter of life or death (e.g. know where trees are, where predators, or your own tribe/clan/family members are in a glance). He also points out that humans might have "traded" this primate short term memory for long term memory and language development. I believe this, and I believe language was our first tool, and we used that tool to build imagination.

Imagination is what helped us think about the future, build houses and prepare for future weather, gather food and be ready for the next day. It helped us think about our past, trying to understand the weather, the sky, the earth. Imagination helped us create bigger abstract constructs that made us create bigger societies, and go from dozens, to hundreds, to thousands, to millions. Abstractions like "people from this side of the mountain", "people that revere the moon", and so on.

Like language, art, poetry, architecture, math, and science are also tools by and for our imagination; they gave us new ways to see ourselves and the world. Computing is the newest item we've added to this list, and we've just scratched the surface.

Computing can help us ask better questions, manipulate language, numbers, and images — a meta-medium, says Alan Kay. It can help us imagine new forms of governance, of cooperation, of sharing. It connects us across the world and creates new and bigger tribes, hopefully healthier than the previous ones.

Every failed policy, every attack from a group to another because of their differences, or the destruction of the natural environment, is all a lack of imagination, on humans' inherent capability to share resources, to cooperate with each other, to see how we are integrated with the environment.

I believe augmenting human imagination, through art, language, science, math and now computing, can help us imagine in our heads better newer worlds, and better versions of ourselves.