Text Exploration
There is a perspective of humanity that acknowledges and fears inefficiencies. Efficiency is a respectful use of limited resources, where resources are prioritized, consumed, and valued. In a world full of problems, resources should logically be spent to solve them, and so this perspective leads to a simple goal for intellectual pursuit: humans exist to solve problems. Inefficiency is the state of disrespecting these resources, and treating them as unlimited and free. Our personal time and money are long-term limited; our attention and active memory are short-time limited. Limit is a word of poverty. If humans are efficient or inefficient, then they are rich or poor, and someone who is rich finds and solves problems.
There is a different perspective of people that largely ignores inefficiency and problem solving, and instead acknowledges and fears inhumanity. This perspective views a world of infinite resources and few natural limits, but a poor relationship between those resources and the people who encounter them. Perhaps the relationship is a problem to be solved, but that “problem” does injustice to the scope and scale of the inhumanity, which often shows up as social inequity: poverty, poor education, lack of basic care and respect, and so-on. One living in poverty likely does not view their poverty as a “problem to solve” but instead considers it as the experience they live with and through.
A world of inefficiency can be made optimized, and a world of inhumanity can be made equitable. Both ends are possible, and can even be made possible at once, but perhaps both are not worth pursuing.
Licklider, a computer scientist, presents the human experience as one to be optimized, and the optimization will occur through a biological melding of the human brain and a computer. This does not exist now, and when this text was written in 1960, it did not exist either. His text presents a case for this melding, which will “hopefully foster the development of man-computer symbiosis,” which will then in turn allow people to “think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approachable by the information-handling machines of we know today.” This future is one of fast processing, convenience, and a respect for efficient use of limited resources.
His text then describes how that melding will occur; the text is a playbook that identifies the challenges that will inevitably be faced in creating a man-computer. Computers are faster than the inefficient “users.” Memory is scarce and expensive. Retrieval must deal with the “human operators and their predilection to designate things by naming or pointing.” People speak a different language than computers, and computers will need to use and support visual work and auditory commands. Speech will be recognized, but that speech would have to be “without unusual accent.” The playbook essentially describes how the symbiosis will solve the problem of human inefficiencies themselves.
Licklider states that the end benefit of those solved efficiencies will be multifaceted, but one benefit stands out: the merging will “make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance.” And this will be “intellectually the most creative and exciting” moments in the history of mankind; while the inhumanities will not be addressed, the inefficiencies will have been solved.