Here, Alan Kay reflects on the impact of Doug Engelbart's aspirations for 'augmenting human intellect' via computer-assisted 'thought vectors' as he discusses the early development of Smalltalk:
> This was in early 1967, and while we were pondering the FLEX machine, Utah was visited by Doug Engelbart. A prophet of Biblical dimensions, he was very much one of the fathers of what on the FLEX machine I had started to call "personal computing." He actually traveled with his own 16mm projector with a remote control for starting and stopping it to show what was going on (people were not used to seeing and following cursors back then). His notion on the ARPA dream was that the destiny of oNLine Systems (NLS) was the "augmentation of human intellect" via an interactive vehicle navigating through "**thought vectors in concept space.**" What his system could do then—even by today's standards—was incredible. Not just hypertext, but graphics, multiple panes, efficient navigation and command input, interactive collaborative work, etc. An entire conceptual world and world view. The impact of this vision was to produce in the minds of those who were "eager to be augmented" a compelling metaphor of what interactive computing should be like, and I immediately adopted many of the ideas for the FLEX machine. source 
Here is how Engelbart expanded on this defining intention for his life's work:
>By “augmenting human intellect” we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. source
More recent use of this term by Geoffrey Hinton
Thought Vectors, Deep Learning & the Future of AI
Sparking us to wonder about 'meaning patterns' explored in Patterns of Meaning as we seek Third-Order Meaning from Markovian Moments
We recognize that the story/garden model uses the device of stories to spark a 'vector' of curiosity that allows readers to co-create meaning as they wander in a 'concept space' of the garden. In this sense, we now find ourselves building on the earlier conceptual models introduced by Bush and Engelbart. Earlier explorations of these ideas can be found at On Writing.
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