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Man-Computer Symbiosis J. C. R. Licklider (1960)

56 points by rballpug

by jauntywundrkind

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If you haven't read Waldrop's The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (2002), run don't walk to your nearest bookstore or library & get a copy. Amazing tale of an incredible creation of computing and connection.
It's so fantastic, such a surprise to see this age now where it no longer takes decades of training to become able to really enter a symbiosis with computers. There's plenty of things not great about LLMs and their behaviors, but there's also so much one can learn with curiosity and their native written language now, that used to all require so much more esoteric knowledge to begin to understand. It's incredible. "The Language Problem" is radically diminished:
> The basic dissimilarity between human languages and computer languages may be the most serious obstacle to true symbiosis.
I loved this quote from Jesse Kriss, as described by Chris Ashworth as he talked about writing some new theater software with LLMs, https://www.tiktok.com/@chris_ashworth/video/760080103729276...
> The interesting thing about this is that it's not taking away something that was human and making it a robot. We've been forced to talk to computers in computer language. And this is turning that around.

by tosh

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> It seems entirely possible that, in due course, electronic or chemical "machines" will outdo the human brain in most of the functions we now consider exclusively within its province.

by vonnik

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fully support the idea of an emerging technobiont, but i keep asking myself what advantage humans will confer to petro-electric life forms?
the only way forward is for us to genetically edit ourselves into beings that can understand more of what ai knows, if the symbiosis is to be mutualistic, rather than commensal or parasitic.

by pmkary

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by beeburrt

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