Irving, Lick, and Man-Computer Symbiosis

I have written about the (utopian or distopian?) belief that the inevitable march of Moore's Law will result in computers overtaking us stick-in-the-mud humans in intelligence within a decade or two.

I'm a skeptic, not because I don't think computers are going to get faster and more capable, but because I think human intelligence has a fair bit more evolution to do itself. Human "intelligence" has long been more than simple biology: biology, culture, and technology have been co-evolving for a very long time, and there's no reason to think that culture and technology, at least, won't continue. (Perhaps biology, too, but that's another story.)

In this regard, I find a recent post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger refreshing. He writes about (among other things) how the goal of technology should not just be to automate the easy but also to assist people in doing the hard. To that end, we should be working not to remove people from the picture, but working to "integrate people into all aspects of our systems designs."

These sentiments remind me of J.C.R Licklider's wonderful 1960 paper, "Man Computer Symbiosis," in which he proposed "to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs." (Of course, Doug Engelbart is always worth reading on these topics too.)

Some 50 years ago, Licklider studied his work habits, and noted that "my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability." I suspect that this observation is still far more true than we would like to believe.

But while the problems and ideas may not be entirely new, we are in a far better position to pursue them, given quasi-ubiquitous personal computers, Internet, and innovative new technologies that build on those platforms. As Irving says, "By integrating people into our system designs, we can leverage these community-based, people-oriented technologies [like advanced collaboration environments] into our complex engineering systems ..." The consequences for the many complex activities that occupy our time nowadays could be very significant.