[10] Norbert Wiener, J.C.R. Licklider and the Global Communications Network by Jay Hauben jrh29@columbia.edu In the last quarter of the twentieth century a new global communications network emerged with a growing effect on most aspects of human society. In the events that launched and nourished this network a prominent role was played by J.C.R. Licklider. He not only envisioned a great leap for human society based on a tight coupling and networking of people and computers, he did much to infect others with his early enthusiasm. He also set in motion a public sponsorship and funding mechanism that brought the communications network he envisioned into reality. In the 1960s, Licklider published two seminal articles: "Man Computer Symbiosis"(1) in 1960 and "The Computer as a Communications Device"(2) written with Robert Taylor in 1968. Looking for the intellectual roots of these papers and Licklider's vision, at least one researcher(3) was drawn to the work of Norbert Wiener. This article will look at some of the related work of Norbert Wiener and J.C.R. Licklider. Norbert Wiener began his teaching and research career at MIT in 1919 at the age of 24. He distinguished himself with original contributions in mathematics and in the connection of mathematics with physical systems as in his study of Brownian motion. Perhaps he is best known for what he called "the science of cybernetics or the theory of communication and control in the machine and in the living organism."(4) Wiener traces the cybernetic synthesis connecting engineering and neurophysiology and his insights about communication to his work in the 1940s related to anti-aircraft predictors. In connection with World War II, Wiener undertook to analyze the problem of improving the success of anti-aircraft fire. An anti-aircraft gunner must shoot ahead of where his target is at the time of firing. The amount and direction ahead must be estimated quickly and accurately. Where to aim is based on knowledge of how the plane has been traveling and where it is likely to travel in the time the shell takes to reach it even if the pilot takes evasive action. Wiener was able to contribute to the solution of this prediction problem partly because he had previously developed the equations to be solved when knowledge in one region is used to predict behavior in another (Hopf-Wiener). Wiener was also familiar with the work at MIT of Vannevar Bush with analog computers. Putting the pieces together, Wiener envisioned the direct coupling of anti-aircraft guns with radar detection and automatic aiming based on his mathematical solution of the prediction equation. Motors attached to the gun turrets could position and aim the gun under the control of data generated by the mathematical processing of input from radar. In fact, as radar became perfected the process was mechanized to the point where the human element could be eliminated from anti- aircraft gun aiming and firing. Wiener reports that his work on this problem had a profound impact on him. Up until this work, the servomechanisms for the control of gun turrets were always assumed to belong to power technology rather than communications technology. What dawned on Wiener was that the action of the motors could be conceived valuably as communicating the aiming parameters to the turret and hence that the motors and the computers controlling them could be treated as communications devices. Wiener wrote that this point of view made him "regard the computer as another form of communications apparatus, concerned more with messages than with power."(5) In addition Wiener saw a striking analogy between the workings of an automatic anti-aircraft system and that of a living organism. There was input, processing of that input, and resulting response. He began to regard the brain and the nervous system in much the same light as a computing machine. Out of such considerations a new synthesis emerged which Wiener eventually termed cybernetics (from the Greek word for "steersman"). As the communications and engineering consequences of Wiener's new ideas were worked out, he began to predict that the series of analogies between the human nervous system and the computer and control systems would lead to the possibility of a very high level of automation.(6) In 1944 at Princeton University, Wiener gathered a group of neurophysiologist, communications engineers, and computing machine people for an informal session to layout some of his thinking. He found a willingness on the part of the members of different disciplines to learn what others were doing and to see the striking similarities. Encouraged by this gathering, there was support for Wiener to launch two series of similar interdisciplinary sessions, one in New York City and the other in Cambridge, MA. He also worked out his new synthesis in Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (The Technology Press, 1948; MIT Press, 1961) and later popularized it in The Human Use of Human Beings (Houghton Mifflin, 1950). Wiener's work raised an important question. What should be the relations between people and machines in the age of automation? He called for an "independent study of systems involving human and mechanical elements to decide which functions should properly be assigned to the two agencies, human and machine."(7) Wiener also worried that automation would lead society to unbearable unemployment unless it was carefully implemented with full concern for the working people. Communication was the unifying thread in Wiener's synthesis. He concluded that "communication is the cement of society. Society does not consist merely in a multiplicity of individuals meeting only in personal strife and for the sake of procreation, but in an intimate interplay of these individuals in a larger organism."(8) It was in the strengthening of this larger organism via the improvements in communications that his hope lie that the problems also generated could be solved. He therefore sought to "bring to the attention of all the possibilities and the dangers of the new developments."(9) After WWII, Wiener's ideas began to be known and discussed in scientific and technical circles. When asked in an interview in 1988 where his interest in digital computers came from, J.C.R. Licklider answered, "There was tremendous intellectual ferment in Cambridge after WWII. Norbert Wiener ran a weekly circle of 40 or 50 people. I was a faithful adherent to that."(10) He added that, even though he was a researcher and faculty member at Harvard at the time, he audited a seminar given by Wiener and participated in an MIT faculty group that discussed cybernetics. The weekly circle launched by Wiener in 1948 that Licklider attended with his colleagues Walter Rosenblith and M. Fred Webster was know as the seminar on scientific method.(11) On the way home from each dinner meeting, Licklider and his friends critiqued what had been presented and discussed and shared with each other what from their different disciplinary perspectives each had understood. In 1950 Licklider left Harvard to join the MIT faculty and research community of which Wiener was a part. Licklider described himself as "an experimental psychologist interested especially in how the brain works in conjunction with hearing, but also in speech and communication and human engineering."(12) At MIT he participated in two summer studies sponsored by military branches which gave him "an opportunity to hear of computers and radar sets and communications."(13) His own work, very much in the Wiener tradition, was split into psychology, acoustics and electronics. His efforts to try to model how the brain works in hearing with an analog computer convinced him he really had to learn digital computing. Licklider left MIT in 1957 to work at the acoustic consulting firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) where he was promised access to digital computing. However he maintained his ties with MIT and its scientific and technical community and participated with Norbert Wiener and others in many important events there like the 1961 MIT Centennial Celebration. At BBN, Licklider undertook a small research project that was to lead to his answer to Wiener's question of the future relation between people and computers. Licklider did a mini time-motion study of the activities during the hours regarded as devoted to work of a technical person. Although he was aware of the inadequacy of the sampling, he wrote, "I served as my own subject." He found that 85% or more of his "thinking" time was devoted to clerical or mechanical chores: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the dynamic or logical consequences of a set of assumptions or hypothesis, preparing the way for a decision or insight. Having had the opportunity at BBN to sit at an interactive computer for four or five hours on a regular basis, Licklider drew the conclusion that it should be possible to create a flexible relationship via programming and interface devices between a person and a computer so that both could contribute what it does best to the accomplishment of mental work. In "Man-Computer Symbiosis", he presented his conclusion that "in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by information handling machines we know today." Licklider's vision was different from that of the computer becoming a servant for people or an extension of a person's abilities and different from the long range goal of artificial intelligence researchers that the computer would one day replace or supercede human thinking. Wiener had also foreseen a people-computer partnership. For example, Wiener envisioned a computer programmed to translate from one language to an other whose output would be filtered through a human translation expert. The human would make sure that the translation made sense in the final language. This expert might then reprogram the computer to do better or devise exercises for the computer from which it could learn to make improved translations. Licklider was carrying this prediction further by suggesting that computers could be involved in the formulation of questions and in the process of thinking and working through to their solution. The human would handle very low probability situations, propose hypotheses, and make unusual connections; the computer would convert hypotheses into testable models, retrieve information, create simulations, etc. Most of Licklider's article laid out research tasks that needed to be accomplished in order for this vision to be realized. These included the need to achieve better computer memory capacities, to network and internetwork computers, to develop graphical and audio interfaces and for languages that facilitated learning by both humans and computers. These research tasks were to make up much of the research agenda of the newly emerging discipline of computer science. Licklider put forward that agenda and then as director of the Information Processing Technologies Office of the Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) fostered it by arranging for its public support and funding. Besides taking up the question of the human-computer relationship raised by Wiener's work, Licklider together with Robert Taylor investigated the implications of Wiener's insight that computers were communications devices. For Wiener, communication was closely linked with control: to manufacture a car, for example, people could communicate with a computer via programming. The computer could then communicate the motions necessary to assemble the car to the tools via servomechanisms. The tools in turn would respond with motion and feedback. This was the automation revolution which Wiener's experience with the anti-aircraft problem helped him to foresee. In "The Computer as a Communications Device", Licklider and Taylor look for how the computer will help people do more than send and receive data. Their emphasis was deliberately on people. They saw the possibility that communication would be dynamic. "When minds interact new ideas emerge" they wrote. They saw that the programmed digital computer helped create a medium that is plastic, can be modeled, where premises could flow into consequences, and "above all a common medium that can be contributed to and experimented with by all. Its presence can change the nature and value of communication even more profoundly than the printing press and the picture tube, for a well-programmed computer can provide direct access both to informational resources and to the process for making use of resources."(14) Licklider and Taylor argued that when information transmission and information processing are combined and available on networks of computers cooperation, collaboration and coherence are much more likely to occur than among isolated researchers. By making possible quality transmission and processing of information among geographically separated people, there would follow the creation of communities not of common location but based on commonality of interest that would be large enough to support comprehensive accumulations of people, data and programs. Like Wiener, they saw great benefit to society as a result of the communication revolution made possible by the digital computer and the global computer network. But also just as Wiener warned of the danger of unplanned automation, Licklider and Taylor included in their article a warning: "For the society, the impact will be good or bad depending mainly on the question: Will 'to be on line' be a privilege or a right? If only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of 'intelligence amplification,' the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity."(15) Licklider and Taylor's article in 1968 ushered in the great experiment that began in 1969 as the ARPANET and that we know today as the Internet. In summary, in the 1940s Norbert Wiener developed a synthesis that stressed the importance of communications. The ideas and questions raised by him fueled an intellectual ferment in and around MIT. J.C.R. Licklider and other time sharing and networking pioneers took part in that ferment and in the intellectual and technical community at MIT and the greater Boston area which contributed so much to the technological developments of the second half of the twentieth century. It is not a surprise that there would be a connection between the cybernetics synthesis that Wiener introduced and the contributions of pioneers like Licklider. That a new global communications network exists today is a tribute to Wiener and to Licklider and the other pioneers who developed the original insights into a promising advance for human society. --------------- Notes: 1) J.C.R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," In IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, Vol HFE-1, March, 1960, Pp. 4-11. Also reprinted in "In Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider: 1915-1990, Report 61", Systems Research Center, Digital Equipment Corporation, Palo Alto, California, August 7, 1990, pp. 1-19. 2) J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, "The Computer as a Communication Device," In Science and Technology: For the Technical Men in Management, No 76, April, 1968, pp. 21-31. Also reprinted in "In Memoriam: J.C.R. Licklider: 1915-1990, Report 61," Systems Research Center, Digital Equipment Corporation, Palo Alto, California, August 7, 1990, pp. 21-41. 3) See Ronda Hauben, "Cybernetics, Time-sharing, Human-Computer Symbiosis and Online Communities: Creating a Supercommunity of Online Communities," chapter 6 in "The Netizens and the Wonderful World of the Net: On the History and the Impact of the Internet and Usenet News," Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, online manuscript, January 10, 1994, URL http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/ 4) Norbert Wiener, I Am A Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1956, p. 269. 5) ibid., p. 265. 6) ibid., p. 275. 7) Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964, p. 71. 8) I Am A Mathematician, p.326. 9) ibid., p. 308. 10) Interview of J.C.R. Licklider by William Aspray and Arthur L. Norberg, tape recording, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 28 October 1988, OH 150, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 11) "The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symbosium," Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994, p. 19. 12) "The Project MAC Interviews" by John A. N. Lee and Robert Rosin, in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol 14 no 2, 1992, pp. 15-16. 13) ibid., p.16. 14) "The Computer as a Communication Device," p. 22. 15) ibid., p. 40. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 8 No 1 Winter/Spring 1998. The whole issue or a subscription are available for free via email. Send a request to jrh@ais.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------------