He more than did his job. But who is the Doug Engelbart of today?
Where are the people that can articulate an actually desirable digital future and rally everybody (including those exclusively focused on pecuniary matters) around a human-centric vision?
I don't think anyone gets funded to do this kind of out of the box research anymore. Companies expect immediate results and a strict following of agile processes. If you're not tightly iterating a granular week by week towards a very specific task they don't want you around.
I find the erights/Agoric crowds'/Mark S. Miller's ideas interesting and desirable. While they have a very market/techno-centric perspective, their vision puts secure decentralized cooperation at the forefront, an approach that gets easily overlooked in today's centralized internet.
It's a libertarian perspective promoting individual sovereignty and bottom-up emergent organisation. It highlights flaws in the (security) architectures of our currently popular operating systems and programming languages, which were not built around a network-centric model because they originated from the pre-internet age.
Their paradigm reifies access and resource rights as manageable capabilities, and so allows for new forms of (self-) supervision, control and cooperation. An extension of concepts found in the real (legal) world into the digital realm.
Where are the people that can articulate an actually desirable digital future and rally everybody (including those exclusively focused on pecuniary matters) around a human-centric vision?