July 24, 2010
Licklider on cooperative modeling and linked data
From The Computer as a Communication Device, by J.C.R. Licklider, 1968:
"... The switching function is important but it is not the one we have in mind when we say that the computer can revolutionize communication. We are stressing the modeling function, not the switching function. Until now, the communications engineer has not felt it within his province to facilitate the modeling function, to make an interactive, cooperative modeling facility.
Information transmission and information processing have always been carried out separately and have become separately institutionalized. There are strong intellectual and social benefits to be realized by the melding of these two technologies. There are also, however, powerful legal and administrative obstacles in the way of any such melding.
... Take any problem worthy of the name, and you find only a few people who can contribute effectively to its solution. Those people must be brought into close intellectual partnership so that their ideas can come into contact with one another. But bring these people together physically in one place to form a team, and you have trouble, for the most creative people are often not the best team players, and there are not enough top positions in a single organization to keep them all happy.
Let them go their separate ways, and each creates his own empire, large or small, and devotes more time to the role of emperor than to the role of problem solver. The principals still get together at meetings. They still visit one another. But the time scale of their communication stretches out, and the correlations among mental models degenerate between meetings so that it may take a year to do a week’s communicating."
LOL at the closing paragraph of this paper!
... Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever, for consider the magnitude of the task of adapting the network’s software to all the new generations of computer, coming closer and closer upon the heels of their predecessors until the entire population of the world is caught up in an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging."