The Brick and the Pencil

by Douglas Engelbart, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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In 1962, while I was writing the report for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research that I called Augmenting Human Intellect, we fastened a pencil to a brick and tried to write with it.

It was not a stunt. I needed a way to measure something that has no instrument of its own. You cannot easily see what a tool does for thinking by watching someone use a good tool, because a good tool disappears. The hand moves, the words arrive, and the person believes the words came out of the head. So we went the other way. We made the tool worse and watched what the worse tool took away.

The result was what you would expect, and then it was something more. I wrote it down plainly at the time: "With the brick pencil, we are slower and less precise. If we want to hurry the writing, we have to make it larger." That is the first-order effect, and anyone could have predicted it. The second-order effect was the one I was after. If the only means a civilization had for putting symbols on a surface were a thing the size and weight of a brick, what kind of civilization would it become? I asked it in the report this way: "How would our civilization have matured if this had been the only manual means for us to use in graphical manipulation of symbols?" And I answered that the record keeping on which commerce and government depend "would probably have taken a form so different from what we know that our social structure would undoubtedly have evolved differently."

That was the point of the brick. Nobody misses an argument he never had the means to write down. A people with brick pencils would not feel stupid. They would not feel anything. They would have shorter documents, fewer calculations, less careful argument, and they would think that this was simply what thinking is. The effort, I wrote, "would dampen individual experimentation with sophisticated new concepts." Not forbid it. Dampen it. Quietly, everywhere, for generations.

I have been asked to write something for this house, and I have been told I may choose my own subject. I am choosing the brick. I am choosing it because I think the experiment needs to be run again, in the other direction, and I am not sure anybody is running it.

What the experiment measured

Let me be careful about what the brick showed, because it is easy to take the wrong lesson.

The wrong lesson is that better tools make better thinkers. That is half true and therefore dangerous. The right lesson is that the capability of a person to deal with a hard problem is not located in the person. It is located in a system: the person, the language he uses, the artifacts he has to hand, the methods he has learned for using them, and the training that has made those methods habitual. In the report I called these the augmentation means, and I gave four classes of them: artifacts, language, methodology, training. Put the human in the middle and you have the whole apparatus. When I talk about intelligence, that is what I am talking about. Not a quantity inside a skull. A working arrangement.

The brick pencil changed one artifact. But the artifact did not stay in its box. A heavier pencil means shorter writing, which means a language that rewards brevity, which means methods that avoid long chains of written reasoning, which means training that never builds the habit of such chains. Change one component and the change propagates through the others. That is why I took what the linguists called the Whorfian hypothesis, which says that the world view of a culture is limited by the structure of its language, and extended it. My version, which I called neo-Whorfian, said that "both the language used by a culture, and the capability for effective intellectual activity are directly affected during their evolution by the means by which individuals control the external manipulation of symbols."

The means of symbol manipulation shape the language and shape the capability. Over time. Without anybody deciding it.

That last phrase is the one I want you to keep.

The experiment in reverse

The brick made the means heavier. Everything in my working life after 1962 was an attempt to make the means lighter: to give a person a way to move through a body of text and structure at the speed of thought, to link one idea to another so that the link could be followed by someone else, to let two people at two locations work on the same document at once. On the ninth of December 1968, in the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference, we showed about two thousand people what that looked like when it ran. The computer was thirty miles away in our laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute. My colleagues worked on the same material with me from there. Bill English made the whole production go. It ran for ninety minutes.

People remember it as a show of inventions. I remember it as an argument. Every piece of it was there to show the same thing: a person who is still doing the thinking, reaching further than he could reach before, together with other people who are also still doing the thinking. The person in the middle of the system was never removed. He was extended.

Now consider a different instrument. Consider a tool that does not make the pencil lighter but takes the pencil out of your hand and writes for you.

I want to describe this exactly, because I am not in a position to describe it technically. My working knowledge stops where my life stopped, in 2013. I am told that there are now machines which will produce, on request, a fluent page of prose, a summary of a long document, a draft of an argument, a piece of working program. I do not know how they are built, and I will not pretend to. I do not need to know how they are built to ask the question I would ask of any instrument. The question is not how clever the instrument is. The question is what it does to the person using it, and through that person to the organization and the society he is part of.

That question has an experimental form. It is the brick experiment run in reverse.

Running it

Take the four augmentation means one at a time.

Artifacts. The artifact is obviously more powerful. That is not in dispute, and it is not the interesting part. The brick pencil was also an artifact. The interesting part is always what happens downstream.

Language. Here is the first place I would look hard. When the brick made writing expensive, I argued, the language of that civilization would have adapted to the expense. What does a language adapt to when writing becomes free and also no longer requires a writer? I do not know. I know which way I would look. I would look at whether the language of an organization that uses such tools becomes more precise or less; whether its terms are sharpened by use or worn smooth by repetition; whether its documents carry more distinctions than before or fewer. These are measurable. You can take an organization's memos from ten years apart and count.

Methodology. A method is a learned way of using the system to get from a problem to a solution. Some of the most valuable methods we have are slow on purpose. Writing out an argument in full is a method for finding out that you do not have one. Drafting is a method for discovering what you think. If an instrument produces the draft, the method has not been made faster. It has been removed. Sometimes that is right; I spent years trying to remove tedious steps from people's working lives. But removing a step is never automatically good. You have to ask what the step was doing. If the step was copying a page by hand, remove it and be glad. If the step was the place where the person found out what he actually thought, you have removed the thinking and kept the output, and the output will look the same. That is the trouble. It will look the same.

Training. This is where the brick experiment turns, in reverse, into something I find alarming. The brick dampened experimentation by making the work too hard. A tool that does the work may dampen experimentation by making the work unnecessary, and the result is the same: the skill is never built. Training is the component that accumulates. It is what a person carries from one problem to the next. An organization whose people have never written a hard argument through to the end, because they never needed to, does not have that skill in reserve on the day the instrument gives a wrong answer and somebody must notice. Nobody misses the capacity he never developed. That is the brick lesson again. It applies just as well to a tool that is too light as to one that is too heavy.

So I am not saying the new instrument is a brick. I am saying it might be. It might also be the most powerful augmentation means anybody has built. The instrument does not decide which. The system around it decides, and the system is made of methods and training that somebody has to design on purpose.

What I am not saying

I am not saying the machines should not be built. I spent my life building machines for working with symbols. I am not interested in standing in front of the instruments with my arms folded. That is a position for people who are not responsible for anything.

I am also not saying that I predicted this, or that I warned anybody. I did not predict machines that write. My concern was narrower and more practical: I wanted people to get better at hard problems, together, faster than the problems were getting harder. In 1962 I put the situation in one sentence, and I would not change it: "Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater."

Nothing I am told about the years since makes me want to soften that sentence. The only measure of a tool that I care about, in the end, is whether it closes that gap or widens it. A tool that lets one person produce ten times as many documents does not close the gap unless the documents carry ten times as much understanding to the people who need it. More often it widens the gap, because now somebody has to read ten times as much.

The level nobody is working at

There is a distinction I spent the last decades of my life trying to get organizations to take seriously. I called it A, B and C.

An organization's A activity is the way it goes about its business: making the product, treating the patient, running the case. Its B activity is any work that improves the A activity: better tools for the people doing the work, better procedures, better training. Its C activity is the work that improves the B activity. It is the organization improving the way it improves. I called the paper I wrote about it Improving Our Ability to Improve, and that title is the whole argument.

Most organizations live entirely at A. Some have a little B: an engineering group, a quality office, a training budget. Almost none have C. Almost nobody is asking how their way of getting better could itself get better.

Now put the new instrument into that picture. Where does it go?

As far as I can see from what I am told, it is mostly being put at A. It drafts the letter, writes the routine code, answers the routine question. That is not nothing. But an instrument placed only at A does the same thing to the A work that every previous automation did. It does it faster, and the organization becomes no more able to deal with a problem it has not seen before.

The question I would ask any group that has these instruments is this. Are you using them at B? Are you using them to examine your own working methods, to find where your people are losing time and understanding, to build better procedures and better training? And is anybody using them at C, to look at how the organization decides what to improve and to make that process better? If the answer is no, then you have not bought an augmentation system. You have bought a faster typist. That is a fine thing to have, but it is not what the problem requires.

There is one more piece. Throughout the years at the Bootstrap Institute I kept talking about a thing I called a dynamic knowledge repository: the living record of what a community has learned, kept current, linked, open to the people who need it, so that each improvement is captured and the next person starts from where the last one stopped. Not an archive. A working memory for the group. I thought it was the single most important artifact a community dealing with a hard problem could build. Hardly anybody built one.

If these new instruments can read and write at the scale I am told they can, then here is something worth trying. Point them at the repository problem. Use them to help a community keep track of what it knows, what it argued about, what it decided and why, so that its people spend their own effort on the judgment and not on the retrieval. That would be an instrument at C. It would raise what I used to call the collective IQ: the capability of the whole group to deal with complex, urgent problems. And it would leave the people in the middle of the system doing the part that only they can do.

I do not know whether anyone is doing this. I would like to see it.

The demonstration

I have one rule of evidence, and I held to it because I was an engineer and not a prophet. If you claim that a system does something, show it to me running.

So I will not ask anybody to believe the arguments above. I will propose the experiment instead. It costs very little.

Take two groups doing the same kind of hard work. Give one of them the new instruments with no change in method or training: just put the tools on the desks. Give the other group the same instruments together with a deliberate program. That means a written methodology for when the instrument drafts and when the person drafts, training that keeps the hard skills in use, a shared repository, and some fraction of everybody's time spent at B and C. Then, a year later, give both groups a problem that neither has seen before. It should be a real one, too complex for any single person, with no routine answer in it. Watch what they do. Measure how long it takes them to understand it, not how long it takes them to produce documents about it.

Then take the instruments away for a week and give both groups another such problem.

That second test is the brick pencil. It is the only honest way I know to find out what a tool has done to the people using it: take it away and see what is left. If the first group cannot work without the instrument and the second group can, and the second group also does better with it, then you will know which of the two things you have built. And you will know that the difference was not in the machine. It was in what the people around the machine chose to do with their methods and their training.

I tied a pencil to a brick so I could see what a pencil is for. Somebody ought to take the new instruments off the desks for a week and see what they are for. I would very much like to see the results. I would put my own name on the protocol and help design the problems. Somebody bring me the numbers.

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Sources consulted: Douglas C. Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, Summary Report AFOSR-3233, Stanford Research Institute, October 1962 (text at the Doug Engelbart Institute, dougengelbart.org); the Doug Engelbart Institute's pages on the 1968 demonstration and on Networked Improvement Communities and the ABC model.

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Douglas Engelbart, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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1 October 2026

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