Quotes from work

Man-Computer Symbiosis

"Man-Computer Symbiosis" is the title of a work by J.C.R. Licklider, which was published in 1960.Man-computer symbiosis is a fundamental or key text of the modern computing revolution.The work describes something of Lickliders' vision for a complementary relationship between humans and computers at a potential time of the future. According to Bardini, Licklider envisioned a future time when machine cognition would surpass and become independent of human direction, as a basic stage of development within human evolution. Jacucci gives the description of Lickliders' vision as being the very tight coupling of human brains and computing machines .As a necessary pre-requisite of human-computer symbiosis, Licklider conceived of a thing known as the Thinking centre. Altogether these things were pre-conditions for the development of networks.Streeter identifies as the main empirical element of the work as the time and motion analysis, which is shown under Part 3 of the work. In addition he identified two reasons for Licklider to have considered such a concept as a symbiotic human computer relationship at all as beneficial, to be firstly, for it might bring about an advantage emerging from the use of a computer, such that there are similarities with the necessary methodology of such a use , to the methodology of problem solving through play, and secondarily, because of the advantage which results from using computers in situations of battle. Foster states Licklider sought to promote computer use in order to "augment human intellect by freeing it from mundane tasks."As his personal motivating force, Streeter considers Licklider to be positing an escape from the limitations of the mode of computer use during his time, which was batch processing. Russell thinks Licklider was stimulated by an encounter with the newly developed PDP-1.