Joseph Licklider wrote: “The hope is that . . . human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought.”

1960

LICKLIDER’S “MAN-COMPUTER SYMBIOSIS”

In 1960, psychologist and computer scientist Joseph Licklider (1915–1990) published a seminal paper titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” He begins his essay by explaining a symbiotic relationship of a fig tree, which is pollinated by a Blastophaga wasp whose eggs and larvae derive nourishment from the tree. In the same way, Licklider proposed, humans and computers could form a symbiotic relationship. In the early years of symbiosis, humans would set the goals and formulate the hypotheses as computers prepared the way for insights. Some problems, he wrote, “simply cannot be formulated without computing-machine aid.”

Rather than envisioning computer-based entities replacing humans, Licklider was more aligned with Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), whose theories of cybernetics tended to focus on close interactions between humans and machines. In the paper, he explains: “The hope is that . . . human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

Licklider also discusses “thinking centers” that he believed would incorporate the functions of traditional libraries, and he suggested the need for natural-language processing for symbiosis.

In his essay, Licklider concedes that “electronic or chemical ‘machines’ will outdo the human brain in most of the functions we now consider exclusively within its province,” and he provides examples of chess playing, problem solving, pattern recognizing, and theorem proving. He clarifies that “the computer will serve as a statistical-inference, decision-theory, or game-theory machine to make elementary evaluations of suggested courses of action. . . . Finally, it will do as much diagnosis, pattern-matching, and relevance-recognizing as it profitably can. . . .”

Nearly sixty years later, Licklider’s paper still raises important questions about the potential union of human intelligence and AI: When the day comes that we have a coupling with machines even more than we have today, will a symbiotic person still be considered a “human”? Will such a person ever consider disengaging from the computer?