PERSON

J.C.R. Licklider

The psychologist-turned-computing-visionary whose 1960 paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis” described, with eerie precision, the partnership between human judgment and machine execution that would arrive sixty-five years later—and who, by tracking his own cognitive workflow, discovered that eighty-five percent of his “thinking” time was preparatory drudgery that a machine could handle.

In 1960, a psychologist at Bolt Beranek and Newman published a ten-page paper that described the future of human cognition with the quiet confidence of someone who had thought about something longer than anyone else in the room. J.C.R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis” predicted that human beings and computing machines would be coupled together so tightly that the resulting partnership would think as no human brain had ever thought. He gave a timeline: fifteen years. He was wrong by half a century. But about the architecture he was almost entirely right, and the architecture is what matters. He specified the division of labor with unusual precision: the human would contribute goals, judgment, and the capacity to evaluate; the machine would handle the routinizable work of searching, calculating, and executing. The coupling would liberate the human for the fifteen percent of cognitive work that was genuinely irreplaceable, the creative, formulative

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