Man-Computer Symbiosis
J. C. R. Licklider | IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics 1960
In a Nutshell 🥜
Licklider1 imagines a future where human brains and computing machines are coupled together so tightly such that a symbiosis is formed. The paper defines symbiosis as the cooperative “living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms”. The resulting symbiosis allows humans to “set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations” and machines to “do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking”.
The paper argues that much of a person’s “thinking” time is actually spent on clerical activities such as retrieving and organizing necessary information (about 85% of the author’s thinking time)2. The paper therefore argues that such type of “thinking” should be performed by the machine. On the other hand, people should take a high-level role such as setting the goals and hypotheses, designing the mechanisms, and handling very-low-probability situations when machines fail. The paper then suggests a set of areas that need to be resolved before the symbiosis can be realized, including process speed mismatch, memory hardware requirements, memory organization requirements, language mismatch, and input and output equipment for interaction.
Some Thoughts 💭
The paper takes a human-centered approach to human-computer interaction, assigning humans the role of policymakers and machines the role of handling clerical activities.
While being ahead of its time in many respects, the paper did not foresee the rapid advancement of the pattern recognition capabilities of computers: “it will do as much diagnosis, pattern-matching, and relevance-recognizing as it profitably can, but it will accept a clearly secondary status in those areas.”
Licklider, J. C. (1960). Man-computer symbiosis. IRE transactions on human factors in electronics, (1), 4-11.
I think this has been reduced greatly since the paper’s writing, thanks to work done by the information retrieval community.