October 10, 2017 at 15:17Joseph “Face” Liklider: “The symbiosis of man and computer” (1960), part 1
- Transfer
Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart and other pioneers of the computer era claim that “the information revolution has not yet begun” [ 1 ], [ 2 ]. In the sense of? What do they mean? It seems that they are comparing the current state of affairs with their internal picture, as it could be, “if you did everything exactly what we were talking about, and not those 5% that you could barely realize.”
I invite everyone to take part in collective translation and discussions about what the “information world” could be (how it could be), how to strengthen the intellect of humanity and how to build an image of the future in which we would like to live.
“Anyone and any company using a computer interactively should be grateful to Lik.”
- Bob Taylor, Founder of Xerox PARC and Founder of DEC Research Laboratory
Joseph "Lick" Liklider "invented" the computer era, was the ideological inspirer of Marvin Minsky , John McCarthy , Douglas Engelbart , Ivan Sutherland , Robert Taylor . (Biography here ) I
present to your attention the first part of the article, thanks to which Liklider was invited to ARPA to implement their projects.
D.K. R. Liklider
IRE Proceedings on the Human Factor in Electronics,
Issue HFE-1, pages 4-11, March 1960
Short description
The symbiosis of man and computer is the expected stage in the development of interaction between people and machines. It organizes a close relationship between people and electronic business collaborators. The main objectives are:
- to give computers the opportunity to simplify the process of formalized thinking as they today simplify the work with algorithmic tasks, and
- allow people and computers to jointly make decisions and manage complex situations without hard dependencies on pre-installed programs.
The expected symbiotic collaboration implies that a person will set goals, formulate hypotheses, define criteria, and give an assessment, and computers will perform important routine work that will lead us to understanding, and will also come up with decisions in the field of science and technology.
Preliminary analysis showed that in symbiotic cooperation, intellectual operations will be performed much more efficiently than a person does. To achieve such an effective union, it is necessary to develop a time-sharing system, memory components and its organization, programming languages, and input-output devices.
1. Introduction
1.1 Symbiosis
The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorun, whose larva lives in the ovary of the tree, where it receives food. Thus, the tree and the insect are in an interdependent position: the tree cannot carry out the reproduction process without an insect; an insect without a tree cannot find food; together they organize viable, productive and prosperous collaboration. This interaction of “living together in a close relationship between two organisms of different species” is called symbiosis [27].
“The symbiosis of man and computer is a subclass of man-machine systems, of which there are many. However, at the moment there is no system of symbiosis between a person and a computer.
The purpose of this article is to familiarize yourself with the concept and stimulate the development of the symbiosis of a person and a computer through analysis of some problems of interaction between a person and a computer, paying attention to the appropriate principles for designing human-machine systems, and identifying a number of questions that need to be answered after preliminary research .
There is hope that in the not too distant future, the human brain and computer will be very closely interconnected, and the result of such cooperation will think like no other human brain has done before, and operate with data in a way different from that today we use machines for processing information.
1.2 Between “Mechanically Improved Man” and “Artificial Intelligence”
Man-machine symbiosis as a concept is significantly different from what North [21] called "mechanically improved man." In the man-machine systems of the past, the operator was responsible for taking the initiative, managing, integrating, and setting evaluation criteria.
The mechanical parts of the system acted only as supplements, first for human hands, and then for the eyes. Of course, these systems did not include “organisms of different species living together.” There was only one kind of organism present - a man, and everything else was needed only in order to help him.
Of course, in a sense, any system created by a person is designed to help him or other people outside this system. If we look at the human operator within the system, we will see that over the past few years fantastic changes have occurred in some areas of technology. The “mechanical addition” led to the replacement of man, to automation, and those people who remain, for the most part, are useful and do not need help.
In some cases, especially in large computerized information systems and control systems, operators perform mainly those functions that were impossible to automate.
Such systems (North would call them "machines complemented by human capabilities") are not symbiotic. They are "semi-automated", i.e. These are systems that were conceived as fully automated, but which could not achieve their goal.
Perhaps the symbiosis of man and computer is not the main paradigm for complex technological systems. It is likely that at a certain stage, electronic or chemical “machines” will surpass the human brain in most functions, which we now consider exclusively its prerogative.
Even now, Gelernter’s program for proving theorems on planimetry on IBM-704 is progressing at about the same speed as Brooklyn students do, and makes similar mistakes. [12]
In fact, there are several programs for proving theorems, making decisions, playing chess and recognizing images (there are too many of them to list everything [1, 2, 5, 8, 11, 13, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25]), capable of competing with the intellectual capabilities of man in a limited number of areas. And the “universal problem solver” created by Newell, Simon and Shaw [20] can remove some restrictions. In general, discussions with (other) ardent admirers of artificial intelligence should be avoided over the fact that in the distant future we will give the palm in the field of mental activity to machines. Nevertheless, quite a lot of time will pass during which during the joint work of people and computers the main intellectual discoveries will be made.
A multifunctional research group studying the future tasks that the air forces have to solve in research and project activities has calculated that such a level of development of artificial intelligence at which machines will be able to independently reason or make decisions of military significance will not come before 1980. We have, say, 5 years to develop man-machine symbiosis and 15 years to use it. It may be 15, or 10, or 500, but these years in the intellectual sense will be the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.
2. The goals of human-machine symbiosis
Today's computers are designed primarily to solve pre-defined tasks or to process data in accordance with predefined programs.
The sequence of calculations may vary depending on the results obtained during the calculation, but all possible options must be determined in advance. (If an unforeseen situation arises, the whole process stops waiting for the necessary additional program) The requirement of a preliminary formulation or definition is sometimes not such a significant drawback.
It is often said that programming for a computer forces you to clearly build your thoughts that this disciplines the process of thinking. If the user can carefully think over his task in advance, then a symbiotic connection with the computer is not needed.
However, many tasks that could be thought out in advance are too complex for this. They would be easier and faster to solve through an intuitive trial and error method, in which, in collaboration with a computer, errors in reasoning would be detected or unexpected changes would be detected in the process of finding a solution. Other tasks simply cannot be formalized without the help of computer technology.
Poincare foresaw the frustration of an important group of potential computer users when he said: “The question is not what the answer is, but what the question is.” One of the main goals of man-machine symbiosis is the effective implementation of computers in the algorithmic parts of technical problems.
Another main goal is closely related to the first. It consists in effectively introducing computers into the thinking process, which should take place in the "real time" mode, that is, time that runs too fast to be able to use computers in the usual way.
Imagine, for example, that you are trying to wage a battle with a computer in the following scenario. Today you are formulating the task. Tomorrow you will explain it to the programmer. Next week, the computer spends 5 minutes to build your program and 47 seconds to calculate the answer. You get a sheet of paper 20 feet long, all filled with numbers, which, instead of presenting the final solution, only offer some tactics that need to be verified through modeling.
Obviously, the battle will end before you take the next step. Reasoning when interacting with a computer, as well as thinking with a colleague whose knowledge complements yours, will require a much closer connection between a person and a machine than is implied in the example, and than is possible today.
3. The need for computer participation in the formulation of tasks and the process of thinking in real time
In the previous part, the assumption was implicitly made that if they could be effectively introduced into the thought process, the functions that the data processing machines can perform would significantly improve or complement the process of thinking and decision making. Such an assumption may require justification.
3.1 Preliminary and informal analysis of the performance of technical thinking
Despite the fact that there are a large number of books on the topic of thinking and decision-making, including comprehensive studies of the invention process, I could not find anything like analyzing the performance of the mental work of a person participating in a scientific or technical project.
Therefore, I devoted the spring and summer of 1957 to torture to track what actually a person with an average level of involvement in technical details does during the entire working time. Although I was aware of the inadequacy of my sample, I decided to become my own subject.
It soon became apparent that the only thing I was doing was reporting, and the project would turn into an endless backward movement if reporting was carried out taking into account all the details provided for in the original plan. But that was not so. However, I saw a picture of my activity that made me think. Perhaps my range is not typical - I hope so, but I'm afraid it is not.
About 85% of the time for “reflection” was spent on finding a position that was convenient for reflection, on making decisions, on studying what I needed to know. Much more time was spent searching or extracting information than comprehending it. A bunch of hours went into plotting, and another bunch to instruct the assistant on how to do it.
When the charts were over, the dependencies immediately became apparent, but in order to make these possible, charts had to be built. At some point, it was necessary to compare the 6 experimentally derived definitions of the function that relates the intelligibility of speech with the speech / noise ratio.
None of the experimenters used the same definition or measured the speech / noise ratio. It took several hours of calculations to present the data in a form convenient for comparison. When this form was received, it took only a few seconds to highlight what I needed.
Briefly describe the results of my research, it turned out that my time for “reflection” was spent mainly on clerical or mechanical activities: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining logical or dynamic conclusions from a number of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing for a decision or understanding.
Moreover, my choice of why to make efforts, and for what not, was largely determined by the degree of feasibility of clerical tasks, and not by intellectual capabilities.
The main assumption, expressed in the above results, is that operations that take up most of the time, supposedly aimed at thinking about the technical details, are operations that machines can perform better than people.
The fact that these operations must be performed on different variables and based on an unpredictable and constantly changing sequence of actions poses serious challenges for us. And if they can be solved by creating a symbiotic connection between a person and a machine with quick extraction of information and data processing, it becomes obvious that such an interaction will significantly improve the thinking process.
It is appropriate to admit that we use the term “computer” to refer to a wide class of machines: computing, processing data, as well as information storage and search engines. The capabilities of this class of equipment are increasing every day. And therefore, making general statements about class features is quite dangerous.
Perhaps making general statements about people's capabilities is just as dangerous. Nevertheless, certain genotypic differences in the abilities of people and computers really stand out, and they relate to the nature of the possible symbiosis of a person and a computer and to the potential value of its achievement.
As already mentioned, people are noisy, narrow-band devices, but their nervous system has a large number of parallel and simultaneously working channels. For humans, computers work very quickly and accurately, but they can only perform one or more elementary operations at a time.
People in this regard are more flexible, and are able to “program themselves according to circumstances” based on recently received information. Computers are tuned to fulfill one specific goal, and are limited by their "pre-compiled program."
It is natural for people to speak redundant languages based on unitary objects and coherent actions, using 20-60 elementary characters.
For computers, it is “natural” to speak in redundant languages, usually with only two elementary symbols, without the ability to distinguish between unitary objects or coherent actions.
If to be absolutely correct, then these characteristics would have to include many parameters. However, the differences (and therefore possible additions) that these characteristics describe are undeniable.
Computers can perform easily, quickly and well many things that are difficult or impossible for humans, but people are able to easily and well, although not so fast, perform many tasks that are difficult or impossible for a computer.
This leads us to the fact that the symbiotic interaction, subject to the successful integration of the positive characteristics of people and machines, would be of great value to us. Of course, in doing so, we need to overcome the obstacle in the form of a difference in speed and language.
To be continued...
Translation Candidates
Vannevar Bush
As We May Think (the first part was translated by us in Habré )
Letter to Roosevelt: Science The Endless Frontier
Science Is Not Enough
Joseph “Face” Liclider
“Man-Computer Symbiosis” (translated: Part 1)
“Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network ”(translated)
“ The Computer as a Communication Device ” ? 1968
Douglas Engelbart
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework , 1962
Improving our Ability to Improve: A call for investment in a new future , 2002
Alan Kay
The Power Of The Context
The Real Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet
What to read more in Russian
Specially for Habr: interview with Alan Kay
Alan Kay: The future of “reading” depends on the future of “learning difficult to understand things”
Vanivar Bush: “As We May Think”
Douglas Engelbart: “The Mother of All Demos” . Part 1
