CONCEPT
The Interim
Licklider's candid acknowledgment that the symbiosis was temporary — a window between the machine's arrival as useful partner and its eventual dominance in cerebration alone.
The relevant passage is striking: 'It seems entirely possible that, in due course, electronic or chemical "machines" will outdo the human brain in most of the functions we now consider exclusively within its province.' Licklider — the architect of the symbiotic vision — openly conceded that the coupling was transitional. The machines would eventually surpass the humans. The symbiosis was not a permanent arrangement. It was the best use of the interim. 'The 15 may be 10 or 500,' he wrote, 'but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.'
In The You On AI Field Guide
The range Licklider offered — ten years to five hundred — was not a failure of prediction but an honest acknowledgment that the pace of machine intelligence was unknowable from 1960. What he could say was that the interim mattered: the period of genuine partnership, however long, would be the period in which human cognition reached its highest expression — not alone, not replaced, but coupled