J.C.R. Licklider

J.C.R. Licklider

An American psychologist and computer scientist whose 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis" argued that the point of computing was not to replace human thinking but to couple humans and machines so tightly that the pair could reason in ways neither could alone. As the first director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from 1962, he turned that vision into a funding programme, backing the AI laboratories at MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon and the time-sharing and networking research that became the ARPANET. (See also: Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Artificial intelligence (AI))