1915–1990 · psychologist and computer scientist

sychologist by training, J. C. R. Licklider is best known for an idea about computers: that they should be partners in thinking, not just calculators.

what he did

He took his doctorate in psychology and worked at Harvard and MIT before joining the research firm Bolt Beranek and Newman. In "Man-computer symbiosis" (Licklider, 1960) he argued that people and computers have complementary strengths, and that the goal should be a close, interactive coupling in which people set goals, form hypotheses and evaluate, while machines do the routine work that prepares the way for insight [paraphrase, not a quotation].

In 1962 he became the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at the US Advanced Research Projects Agency, where he funded interactive and time-shared computing at universities. A 1963 memo of his, addressed to the "Intergalactic Computer Network", sketched a network linking those machines; the ARPANET that followed is an ancestor of the internet. With Robert Taylor he later wrote (Licklider & Taylor, 1968), predicting that people would communicate through networked computers more effectively than face to face for some purposes.

why he is here

Licklider's symbiosis is the hypothesis that human–AI interaction research is now testing, and the answer is "sometimes". See complementarity.

Primary works and sources

1. Licklider (1960). Man-Computer Symbiosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics. doi:10.1109/THFE2.1960.4503259
2. Licklider & Taylor (1968). The computer as a communication device. Science and Technology, April 1968.

see also

	complementarity — when the partnership works
	annotated: human–AI interaction — starts with him
	automation bias — when it does not