What is striking about written documents from that era is the lucid and yet far more sophisticated writing style compared to contemporary publications.
Would Licklider be happy with the AI slop that we see today? Would he be able to use LLMs in a productive manner?
People in that era could be optimistic because they did not suffer from information overload. The best symbiotic relationship is still man-book or man-pencil-and-paper.
They could be optimistic because they didn’t get suckered by what tech has become. It is the same kind of optimism that can be found in Engelbart’s preamble to the mother of all demos.
The idea that one could treat a program delivered by google, facebook or amazon as something to cooperate with rather than use warily is much harder now than it was then.
Alan Kay chats / blogs / whatever-it-is-people-do-there a lot on Quora and the question "What would be the place of AI in Doug Engelbart's vision of 'Augmenting Human Intellect'? How can we reconsider things within current AI 'developments'?" recently came up.
Thanks for the pointer, didn't know that Quora had threaded discussions.
Excerpt from Alan Kay's answer:
One big distinction in the 1962 time period is that they thought of “machine intelligence” as being a kind of complimentary set of thinking tools that could be “symbiotic” to how humans were able to think. They were not at all thinking about something like a slave or a major domo, but something more like a research assistant or a “Memex” (the latter was a big influence on Doug’s thinking).
In the very late 60s the “official AI researchers” started to think that something like “intelligent Greek slaves” were needed for the “Romans” (Americans), and became rivals to Doug’s notion of elevating human thinking rather than just elevating power. This was a bad idea then … and it’s a bad idea today.
It was interesting to see that Christopher Nolan featured Vannevar Bush prominently in the recent Oppenheimer film. Stripe press published some of his writings recently as well. (I haven't read this one yet)
Major fields of study like chaos (sensitive dependence on initial conditions within an apparently deterministic system), protein structure solving from X-ray diffraction patterns and many others would be impossible without computational assistance from machines.
As far as style and tone, you can certainly get LLMs to mimic Licklider's style with suitable prompting, e.g.
> "In replicating the reflective and anticipatory tone of the original text, it becomes evident that the concept of man-computer symbiosis was not merely speculative but a forecast grounded in the trajectory of technological and computational advancements. This partnership, as envisioned, holds the promise of amplifying human potential through the strategic leverage of computational power, thereby redefining the boundaries of what can be achieved through the confluence of human and machine capabilities. The profound foresight in recognizing and articulating such a partnership underscores a remarkable understanding of the complementary strengths of man and machine, heralding a new era in the evolution of technological augmentation."
Would Licklider be happy with the AI slop that we see today? Would he be able to use LLMs in a productive manner?
People in that era could be optimistic because they did not suffer from information overload. The best symbiotic relationship is still man-book or man-pencil-and-paper.