How the World Got Wired · Licklider’s Dream

Man–Computer Symbiosis

Here was Lick’s argument. The expensive thing about a scientist’s workday wasn’t the computer’s time. It was the scientist’s time. A computer could do arithmetic millions of times faster than a person. A computer never got tired. A computer never had to go home for dinner. The computer was not the bottleneck. The bottleneck was the human brain in front of it, trying to think.

If you could let the human and the computer work together — in real time, in the same room, the computer doing the clerical part while the human did the thinking part — you would not be wasting the computer. You would be saving the human. And humans were more expensive than computers, when you really thought about it. Humans were the rare resource.

In 1960, Lick wrote up his idea in a short paper called Man-Computer Symbiosis. The word symbiosis comes from biology. It describes two different creatures that live together so closely that they depend on each other — the way a clownfish and a sea anemone do, or the way a tree and the fungi on its roots do. Lick was suggesting that humans and computers should become like that. Two very different kinds of mind, working as one.

He wrote, in that paper, that he could imagine — within ten or fifteen years — a kind of “thinking center” that would combine the functions of a library with new ways of storing and finding information, so that anyone who needed an answer could find it quickly.

He was, without quite saying so, describing Google. He was describing it in 1960. He would not live to see Google built — he died in 1990 — but a lot of the people who eventually built it had read his paper when they were young, and remembered.

Two years after he published Man-Computer Symbiosis, in October of 1962, Lick got a phone call. It was from ARPA — the agency you met at the end of the last chapter. Remember: ARPA was the panicked-after-Sputnik agency, with a lot of money and very few rules, looking for smart people with big ideas.

ARPA wanted to fund research on computers. It wanted somebody to run a new office. Would he come to Washington and do it?

Lick said yes.

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