Licklider, Joseph Carl Robnett (1915-1990)

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LICKLIDER, JOSEPH CARL ROBNETT (1915-1990)

J. C. R. Licklider, born on March 11, 1915, was first and foremost a psychologist. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Washington University in 1937 and 1938, respectively, and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Rochester in 1942. In 1941, he joined the faculty at Harvard University, where he was a researcher in the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory until 1946 and then a lecturer at the Psychology Laboratories until 1949. At that point, he joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

At MIT in the 1950s, Licklider was first exposed to computers while working in human factors engineering. He immediately realized their potential for transforming society, but he also realized that this transformation could only be achieved by improving the usability of computers. It was during this period that he did some of his most seminal and influential work.

"Man-Computer Symbiosis"

Published in 1960, "Man-Computer Symbiosis" was one of Licklider's most influential and widely read papers. Although more inclusive language is now used, this idea struck Licklider as having great potential for profoundly transforming the way people do their work. Based, by his own admission, on a completely unscientific evaluation of his own technical thinking, Licklider discovered that he spent most of his time on clerical or mechanical tasks that only served as preparation for thinking. Tasks such as searching, calculating, plotting, and determining the logical consequences of hypotheses or assumptions obstructed the flow of thoughts and insights that ideally should be the sole occupation of a scientist. Moreover, Licklider found to his own embarrassment that his selection of a scientific problem was often based on the feasibility of the necessary clerical work rather than his capacity to do the intellectual work involved. This indicated that further progress in science would be impeded without some way to reduce the clerical load inherent in scientific research.

The answer, Licklider knew, was to have computers do the clerical and mechanical tasks, thereby freeing researchers to concentrate on the intellectual aspects of their work and to perform the decisions that required human judgment rather than accurate calculation. However, it was imperative that the use of computers was a seamless part of research rather than a process that halted when software had to be written to handle particular problems. In this sense, computers had to be interactive, with sophisticated, flexible software that could be used in a large number of situations.

Licklider referred to this complementary division of work between humans and computers as "symbiosis," where the close union and cooperation of two dissimilar organisms benefits both. While in fact humans benefit from this arrangement far more than computers, the analogy nonetheless helps to illustrate Licklider's vision.

Libraries of the Future

Perhaps Licklider's grandest vision was the "Library of the Future," which consisted of large, interconnected, distributed knowledge bases organized and subdivided by fields of knowledge. As conceived, it was far more organized than the World Wide Web that developed in the 1990s and would have offered its users advanced analysis that went far beyond mere text indexing and retrieval.

Although Licklider found the conventional library to have shortcomings, most of which had to do with the physical nature of the printed book and the arrangement of books on library shelves, he still favored the printed page for display. More significant, he favored retaining most "component-level schemata" of current bibliographic practice, including concepts such as titles, authors, abstracts, body text, footnotes, lists of references, catalogs, indexes, and thesauri. These, when combined with the speed of access provided by networked computers and with interactive computing, would have provided some of the components of the online library he envisioned.

While not planned as a centralized, monolithic system, the "Library of the Future" still would have required widespread cooperation to make its various services work in a unified way. Licklider described it as a "procognitive system" that would offer its users access to the actual knowledge contained in the library rather than merely its collection of publications. This proved to be an elusive goal, as it involved somehow extracting and encoding the essence of meaning contained within the literature it encompassed and then allowing the user to have the system execute chains of logical reasoning to test hypotheses. While some expert systems have demonstrated such functionality within limited domains of knowledge, no one as of the year 2000 has succeeded in demonstrating a system that does this in a generalized way.

Other Influential Ideas

In 1962, Licklider joined the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense. While there, he served as director of information processing techniques and behavioral sciences, and he played a significant role in the development of the ARPANET, which demonstrated the usefulness and reliability of high-speed packet-switched networks over large geographical areas and laid the foundation for the Internet. Licklider is also credited with establishing concepts such as time sharing and resource sharing, making it possible for multiple users to access a single large computer.

In 1968, Licklider, along with Robert W. Taylor, published a paper titled "The Computer as a Communication Device," which outlined how networked computers could improve the quality and effectiveness of long-distance communication and support online interactive communities. They described in detail what is essentially the infrastructure of the Internet, with computers interconnected by "message processors" that pass messages between computers and handle such tasks as packet routing and error detection and correction. They also described a number of networked devices that would act as user liaisons in the demanding online world, addressing such issues as e-mail filtering, network security, and even electronic commerce, years before their time.

From 1968 to 1970, Licklider directed project MAC at MIT, the first university-based, large-scale experimental computer science project, which later became the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. His work at ARPA also set the precedent for the establishment of the first graduate programs in computer science, located at the University of California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and Stanford. These programs, which remain among the best graduate computer science programs available, have served as role models for other programs that have since been developed.

Licklider retired from the faculty at MIT in 1985, but he remained a professor emeritus until his death on June 26, 1990.