Licklider 1960

Honestly my skepticism of AI has only increased over time. It's interesting to hear such an early early take, on AI as ascendant but needing a lot of human direction to take off, to really rise.

It feels to me like computing has been in such a long long long world of putting itself above consumers, of appliance-ization/apllicationization of computing where nerds (like me) built totalistic software, software with the pretense of knowing what users want & serving them totally.

The whole Engelbartian vision of Augmenting Intellect has been such an afterthought. Computers are prescribed tools for doing certain things, not holistic machines we can drive further with. This distinction, prescribed versus holistic, is what Ursala Franklin pointed out in her Technological Society ideas.

Here it's so interesting and compelling a tale to me to hear Lick talking about augmentative computing being a bridge into a further beyond. How can AI hope to fulfill its potential when human computer symbiosis has been so ignored, left derelict, been so ignored, at the behest of corporations who make such massive profit infantailizing & making helpless society in the face of technology, giving them forever easier to use better serving options, forever stunting society from ever rising and adapting and growing?

We have been too well served to ever have to pursue the grander challenge of Augmenting Intellect, and in my view the prospects for AI must be ever so much diminished for this forever non-development of symbiosis, for humankind being ever better served without ever improving it's faculties one iota.