PERSON
J.C.R. Licklider
The psychologist-turned-computing-visionary who coined “man-computer symbiosis” in 1960, funded the founders of interactive computing as ARPA’s most consequential patron, and supplied—sixty years before the fact—the frame in which the human can meet the thinking machine without being effaced by it.
J.C.R. Licklider invented no enduring machine, yet the interactive, networked, conversational computer on which all contemporary artificial intelligence runs is, in nearly every particular, the world he described in a handful of papers written when computers were room-sized oracles fed by punch cards and tended by priests. He came to computing as a psychologist—trained in psychoacoustics, a student of how human ears and brains process sound—and he carried the psychologist's question with him: what does the human mind actually need? His answer, derived from a candid self-measurement, was devastating in its specificity. Tracking his own working time, he discovered that “about 85 per cent of my ‘thinking’ time was spent getting into a position to think.” Plotting graphs, searching records, organizing information—the clerical
scaffolding around thought consumed nearly everything, leaving almost nothing for thought itself.
The fifteen percent that remained was the signal; everything else was infrastructure. His response was not complaint but a design proposal: