Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 10

and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent:
the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree;
together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership.
This cooperative 'living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two
dissimilar organisms' is called symbiosis. The hope is 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 the information-handling machines we
know today” (1960). The goal of 'Man-Machine Symbiosis' is then the enabling of
reliable coupling between the humans and their 'external' information as given in
digital computers. To obtain this coupling, the barriers of time and space needed to
be overcome so that the symbiosis could operate as a single process. This required
the invention of ever decreasing low latency feedback loops between humans and
their machines.
In pursuit of that goal, the 'Man-Machine Symbiosis' project was not merely
a hypothetical theoretical project, but a concrete engineering project. In order
to provide the funding needed to assemble what Licklider termed his “galactic
network” of researchers to implement the first step of the project, Licklider
became the institutional architect of the Information Processing Techniques Office
at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) (Waldrop 2001). Licklider
first tackled the barrier of time. Early computers had large time lags in between
the input of a program to a computer on a medium such as punch-cards and the
reception of the program's output. This lag could then be overcome via the use of
time-sharing, taking advantage of the fact that the computer, despite its centralized
single processor, could run multiple programs in a non-linear fashion. Instead of
idling while waiting for the next program or human interaction, in moments nearly
imperceptible to the human eye, a computer would share its time among multiple
humans (McCarthy 1992).
In further pursuit of its goal of human-machine symbiosis, in which some over-
enthusiastic science-fiction fans or academics with a penchant for the literal might
see the idea of a cyborg, the 'Man-Machine Symbiosis' project gave funding to
two streams of research: artificial intelligence and another lesser-known strand, the
work on 'human augmentation' exemplified by the Human Augmentation Project
of Engelbart (1962). Human augmentation, instead of hoping to replicate human
intelligence as artificial intelligence did, only thought to enhance it. At the same time
Licklider was beginning his 'Man-Machine Symbiosis' project, Douglas Engelbart
had independently generated a proposal for a 'Human Augmentation Framework'
that shared the same goal as the 'Man-Machine Symbiosis' idea of Licklider,
although it differed by placing the human at the centre of the system, focusing
on the ability of the machine to extend to the human user. In contrast, Licklider
imagined a more egalitarian partnership between humans and digital computers,
more akin to having a somewhat intelligent machine as a conversational partner
for the human (1962). This focus on human factors led Engelbart to the realization
that the primary reason for the high latency between the human and the machine
was the interface of the human user to the machine itself, as a keyboard was at