Jack Park
Jacob's mentor. Colleague of Doug Engelbart. Originator (in this conversation) of the Humanity 3.0 framing.
The biographical claim Jacob makes
"He cured his own cancer 30 years ago by building his own knowledge-management system and Knowledge Graph. This is mentor of ours, Jack Park, amazing guy."
If literally true, this is one of the more remarkable "the medium is the medicine" stories in tech-mentor-folklore. Jacob presents it without hedging — he believes it.
Humanity 3.0
The phrase that Jacob attributes to Park (or to "one of our mentors") in this conversation:
"What we need as a planet to solve these issues — like COVID, like climate change, like conflict — is first to build Humanity 3.0."
The "World of Warcraft meets collective sense-making" framing follows from this. See Collective Intelligence for the full unpacking.
Position in the lineage
| Generation | Person | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | Doug Engelbart | Original IA / collective-IQ vision; mouse, MOAD |
| 2nd | Jack Park (and others) | Carried the vision forward; built personal-scale demonstrations |
| 3rd | Jacob Cole (and "the prophets of this age") | Building it at internet/LLM scale |
What we don't know
The transcript doesn't specify:
- Park's precise role at SRI / the Augmentation Research Center
- His current location or affiliations
- Specific technical details of his knowledge-management system
- Other published work
These are open questions for future ingestions. (Public records will show that there is a real Jack Park who has worked extensively with topic maps and collective intelligence, but this wiki is built from the transcript alone — the additional context is for the reader to verify.)
Related
- Doug Engelbart — Park's colleague and the lineage source
- Collective Intelligence — the vision Park transmitted to Jacob
- Humanity 3.0 (stub) — could be a separate page if more material accumulates