Man-Computer Symbiosis
Take a look at the image directly above these words. What kinds of feelings does it rouse up in you? Comfort? Curiosity? Uncertainty? Dread? Either way, you’ve likely seen something like this before; it’s an example of what a symbiotic relationship might look like between a person and a machine.
It may also look like this:
Or this:
Or perhaps even this:
In his 1960 essay “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” American psychologist J.C.R. Licklider explains symbiosis by describing the relationship between the wasp species Blastophaga grossorun and a fig tree. Blastophaga grossorun is the sole pollinator of the tree, and the tree is its main source of food. The two are interdependent; they share a symbiotic partnership.
However, symbiosis is not so much a relationship as it is a classification of relationships. Within symbiosis, there lie five types: 1) mutualism, 2) commensalism, 3) predation, 4) parasitism, and 5) competition.
We might be quick to call the enslavement of humankind by machines in The Matrix parasitism. After all, humans are kept in pods, given only illusions of normal life while their bodies are used as an energy source. Then again, humans connected to The Matrix retain their full life-spans, and the lives they lead feel as real as our own; some humans who have been “unplugged” even prefer the Matrix over true reality. It can therefore be argued that the Matrix isn’t completely parasitic—it contains hints of commensalism as well.
While reading Licklider’s essay “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” I found myself puzzling over these various definitions. The relationship Licklider describes is much less steeped in science fiction than the examples I provided, instead resembling our current, everyday interactions with technology. In this “symbiosis,” the person sets the goals and performs the evaluations while the machine carries out the various repetitive calculations that fills the space in between. Such computers will have the ability to assist human thinking in “real-time,” while also contributing their own reasoning and problem-solving skills.
Also in this essay, Licklider conceptualized something remarkably similar to what we now know as the Internet:
It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a “thinking center” that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and
— “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” p8
the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper. The picture readily
enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by
wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services.
These are just the most obvious of the things that “Man-Computer Symbiosis” seems to get right. However, the speculative-fiction-lover in me can’t help but wonder: in what ways does Licklider’s idea of symbiosis fall short? Early on in the essay, he asserts that man-computer symbiosis is NOT the same thing as “the mechanically extended man.” Where the latter describes only one organism with its abilities “extended” by tools, the former depicts a working relationship between two “dissimilar organisms.”
But are machines organisms? Is it even possible to have a symbiotic partnership with a non-living thing? If so, what kind of symbiotic relationships do we engage in with our technology currently? Commensalism? Parasitism? Is there anything we can ever hope to give back to machines that could make the relationship mutualistic? If machines are not an extension of our abilities, doesn’t that make them an entity all their own?
As up and coming designers, these are all questions we must consider. The gap between humanity and technology is closing rapidly, and the possibility of becoming prey or parasites ourselves is becoming more and more of a reality.
