Human-computer symbiosis. It’s been a long way

In 1960, one of the greatest visionaries in the early field of computing, Joseph C.R. Licklider, wrote his famous paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis". In this paper he anticipated the benefits of humans and computers working together, in what he called “man-computer symbiosis”. This would help humankind going one-step further, combining our capability of making decisions with the accuracy of computers.

Licklider identified five challenges for achieving a real "man-computer symbiosis". It is surprising how things have changed, and how services that now we take for granted were very new, at that time, when pioneers like him tackled the computing paradigm. These were the challenges:

A: Speed mismatch between Men and Computers. At that time computers where too expensive to be dedicated to just one user, so every interaction between users and computers was done in batch mode (a user sent a request and, at some unknown moment in the future, the computer responded). Working in real time with a computer was called “time-sharing computing” and was just an aim, at that time. It wasn’t until 1973 that the first personal computer, the Xerox Alto, appeared.

 B: Memory Hardware requirements. In 1960, 11 years before the invention of the first microprocessor, hardware performance was a tough problem. It was key having the capability of storing information in an affordable way with high speed access, expecting that, at some point in the future "memory elements would become as fast as processing elements" substituting film, tapes, and cards by “some new technology”.

 C: Memory Organization Requirements. For Licklider, inherent to the man-computer symbiosis was the requirement that information should be retrievable. And specifies: “both by name and by pattern" and recommending the use of “trie memory” (digital tree or prefix tree) as a “promising idea”.

 D: The language problem. The lack of a way for humans and computers to communicate was saw by Licklider as “the most serious obstacle to true symbiosis”. At that time, FORTRAN was considered a big step in the right direction and Licklider expected “a serious effort to develop computer programs that can be connected together like the words and phrases of speech”.

 E: Input and Output Equipment. Finally, for J. Licklider this was the least advanced area for a proper human-computer symbiosis, at that time. Displays and controls were his areas of concern, as he considered that at that moment “nowhere is anything approaching the flexibility of the chalk and blackboard used in technical discussion”. In addition, he mentions the Automatic Speech Production and Recognition as a desirable capability, especially for top-level decision makers. The reason for this is nicely naive: Licklider says that “if computers are ever to be used by [top level decision-makers] it would very difficult to take a corporation president away from his work to teach him to type”.

That was the real world 60 years ago and thanks to engineering fields that didn’t even exist at that time, society has gone a long way in terms of human-machine symbiosis, or "Intelligent Augmentation (IA)", which is how it is also called .

 I believe J.Licklider would be very happy knowing what we have done so far.