CONCEPT
The Funder of Futures
Licklider's model of technological change as a practice of deliberate patronage rather than inevitable discovery—the insight that visions become real only when someone with resources chooses to make them real, and the warning that AI’s future is equally being chosen right now, by a small number of people, mostly out of public view.
Technological change is usually described as invention: a person discovers a possibility, the world recognizes it, and the future arrives.
J.C.R. Licklider’s career demonstrates that this is almost never how it works. In 1962 he became the first director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, and with it control of a substantial budget and an unusual freedom in how to spend it. He did not direct research from the top down; he did not issue mandates or design systems. He identified the people whose work pointed toward his vision of interactive, networked, symbiotic computing—and he funded them, generously, with patience and trust, and largely left them alone to build. The roster he supported reads like a founding charter of modern computing. Project MAC at MIT, which became the wellspring of interactive computing.
Douglas Engelbart’s augmentation research at SRI, which