Douglas Englebart, inventor of the computer Mouse, has been awarded The British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal. In the BBC News article about his award, he epsouses some of his personal working philosophy, and attitude to not having become spectacularly rich off the back of his inventions:
“It’s very different if your goal had been to get patents and be the first,” he says. “But the goal is; how do we change the world so that we are collectively more capable of dealing with complex and urgent problems?”
and
“I happen to feel that we could be more effective in the way we use the computer,” he says, developing “a whole different sort of language that could be a lot more efficient connecting to our minds.”
and finally
“…could a person invest their professional career to maximise their return to mankind?” he says. “If you really believe that, what kind of a citizen would you be if you didn’t try to do something about that,” he asks.
Petafloptimism 