[HN Gopher] Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960)
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       Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960)
        
       Author : Hooke
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2022-09-15 18:03 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (groups.csail.mit.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (groups.csail.mit.edu)
        
       | nsm wrote:
       | Highly recommend reading The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop
       | for a really great peak into Licklider and the revolution he
       | brought about
        
         | criddell wrote:
         | The version published by Stripe Press is beautiful, but the
         | font is very small. I bought the Stripe Press version and 30
         | minutes into it I went looking for a digital version to read on
         | my Kindle where I could choose my own font.
         | 
         | I absolutely loved the book.
        
           | boxfire wrote:
           | Agree on the density, also initially I had that cool
           | holographic cover facing out the open side of my bookshelf to
           | the living room until one night a passing headlight beamed
           | across it in the dark and I realized how absolutely
           | incredibly creepy it was to have Lick as sudden posthumous
           | voyeur...
           | 
           | On the idea and content, it reveals to me there was a great
           | shadow world of ideas in those early days I think are still
           | being "rediscovered" in the current time. We did an awful job
           | of following through on visionaries like him, hell even Grace
           | Hopper's simple 1955 paper on compiler thru compiler
           | compilers didnt make a comeback until the shadows of the
           | 70's, then 90's, and the past decade.
           | 
           | We imagined the world in the 50s. We invented it in the 60s.
           | And then we entered a profit-driven dark age that is barely
           | letting those results trickle into everyday reality. The
           | future of computing is so far from what we conceptualize
           | today we still don't even have the vocabulary for it.
           | Conceptually this essay lays it out.
           | 
           | Try synthesizing a toy program in Idris2 with a lsp server
           | and querying the compiler about what you are writing as you
           | explore. It will open your eyes that we have _just_ hit this
           | reality. Don 't be fooled by copilot, its the cheap plastic
           | copy of real intelligence working with computers alternating
           | their best strengths.
        
       | kelvich wrote:
       | Licklider is one the main persons behind the ARPANET. The
       | Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberger has a lot of context on
       | his time in DARPA. Few things that I found particularly notable:
       | 
       | * Licklider was conscious about not having too much funding
       | compared to other DARPA projects so that in case of a budget cut,
       | there would a more obvious candidates for the slash.
       | 
       | * Initially, universities pushed back on ARPANET because they
       | were afraid that remote access might lead to more candidates for
       | their mainframe time
        
         | kelvich wrote:
         | And some other projects that DARPA worked on:
         | https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/space-age/the-bunny-t...
        
       | nathias wrote:
       | > In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the
       | goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and
       | perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the
       | routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for
       | insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.
       | 
       | This is how people that knew what are doing were using them, but
       | the generalization of computing didn't include generalization of
       | this knowledge so the side effects have been the opposite of this
       | kind of symbiosis. We are condemned to do the drudgery to fulfill
       | goals set by algorithms.
       | 
       | The author posits a time window for this symbiosis, maybe the
       | time is up.
        
         | daniel-cussen wrote:
         | None of those goals are set by algorithms. They're all in
         | heuristics. All machine learning is heuristic. You never know
         | for sure. If the goal were set by an algorithm that would
         | therefore mean it was airtight. That would be like religion or
         | torture, or both. Walking in the footsteps of Jesus.
         | 
         | Despite not actually being algorithms, but heuristics, the
         | demand for those heuristics is insatiable. And it's verifiable,
         | if you eg send two factor matrices here for me to create the
         | product and send it back, you can check a statistically
         | overwhelming amount of them with a laptop in a second.
         | 
         | http://fgemm.com, coming soon.
        
         | tempie_deleteme wrote:
         | that's 'symbiosis' like using a hammer to put a nail in is
         | symbiosis.
         | 
         | I guess that's fine if all your life is work.
        
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