People You Should Know: J.C.R. Licklider
February 28th, 2008 | by Brad King |Every time I teach a class that has anything to do with technology, I begin by making my kids read “Man-Computer Symbiosis” by J.C.R. Licklider.
He’s not known for building anything. He didn’t create computers, software or networks. He didn’t make the new, new thing. All he did was conceptualize how computer networks should work and what they should do for people. Oh, and he did it in the 50s.
He is, by many measures, the man who helped shape the ideas for what computer software (such as Social Media and Web 2.0 agents) and networks should do for people. Computers, he argued, retrieve and crunch large amounts of data. People add context to that crunched data.
Computers should therefore operate as “agents” for people, increasingly moving towards gathering data before people even request it.
Take an hour, Google him and read his work.
