Norbert Wiener, J.C.R. Licklider and the Global Communications Network
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 actual 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
1960's, 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 paper 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 1940's related to
anti-aircraft predictors.
In connection with World War II, Wiener undertook to analyse 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 travelling
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 perdiction 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 pointing. Wiener reports that his work on
this problem had a profound impact on him.
Up until this work, the servomechnaisms 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 neuro-
physiologists, 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 strenthening 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
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 fermet 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. Jerome Wiesner, an important scientist
and president of MIT, provided the following account of it:
In the winter of 1947, Wiener began to speak about holding
a seminar that would bring together the scientists and
engineers who were doing work on what he called
communications. He was launching his vision of cybernetics
in which he regarded signals in any medium, living or
artificial, as the same; dependent on their structure and
obeying a set of universal laws set out by Shannon. In the
spring of 1948, Wiener convened the first of the weekly
meetings that was to continue for several years...The
first meeting reminded me of the tower of Babel, as
engineers, psychologists, philosophers, acousticians,
doctors, mathematicians, neurophysiologists, philosophers,
and other interested people tried to have their say. After
the first meeting, one of us would take the lead each time,
giving a brief summary of his research, usually
accompanied by a running discussion. As time went on, we
came to understand each other's lingo and to understand, and
even believe, in Wiener's view of the universal role of
communications in the universe. For most of us, these
dinners were a seminal experience which introduced us to
both a world of new ideas and new friends, many of whom
became collaborators in later years."(11)
On the way home from each dinner, 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.
At BBN, Licklider undertook a little research that was to lead to an
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 4 or 5 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 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 forseen a people-computer partnership. For example, Wiener envisioned
a computer programmed to translate from one language to another 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 Comunications 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 as an advance over the
communications engineer's concern with the transfer of information from one
point to another in codes and signals. 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 consequenses,
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 happen
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 accummulations pf 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 1940's 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 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 the cybernetics sythesis 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.
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