Man+Computer=?

Right from the title “Man-computer symbiosis” suggested a complementary relationship between humans and computers. As Licklider imagined a better world with computers, actual users began to communicate with computers. From chats in time-sharing systems to more elaborate real-time interactions in computer defense systems, these early computer infrastructures foreshadowed the many networks operating online today and continue to inform today’s internet. Innovations come from ideas so his predictions in a way help to push them to become the reality. Although his vision wasn’t far from our modern technology, the relationship between humans and computers is more complex.

“Men will set the goals and supply the motivations, of course, at least in the early years. They will formulate hypotheses. They will ask questions. They will think of mechanisms, procedures, and models.” Take social media as an example. Each post you liked, each second you take to look at a post, each comment that you replied is valuable data to collect. Your goal of using Facebook might be just to connect with an old friend but the companies that use these data set another goal: to profit from users. So “men will set the goals and supply the motivations” but different men don’t necessarily share the same goal.

“The information-processing equipment, for its part, will convert hypotheses into testable models and then test the models against data (which the human operator may designate roughly and identify as relevant when the computer presents them for his approval). The equipment will answer questions.” Social media collect users’ data in order to create a “perfect” model that can anticipate any action of a user. They might even understand us better than we understand ourselves. That’s not totally a bad outcome if we build the computer to be more human-driven and not only profit-driven.

In this essay, he kept a relatively positive view of the relationship between computers and humans, but he was also acknowledging the potential that we lost control of those systems. I would say we need to improve our relationship between man and computer like the expectation of J. C. R. Licklider. “Man-computer symbiosis” gives a glimpse of the anticipated future and hope to change for the better.