Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (March 11, 1915 - June 26, 1990) was an American psychologist and computer scientist whose ideas shaped the direction of interactive computing. Trained as an experimental psychologist working on psychoacoustics, he became one of the earliest people to argue that computers should be partners in human thought rather than mere calculating machines.
In March 1960 he published “Man-Computer Symbiosis” in IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics. The paper opens with the line that “man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers.” Licklider envisioned humans setting goals and forming hypotheses while computers handled the routine work that prepared the way for insight and real-time decisions.
In 1962 Licklider joined the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as the first director of its Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). From that position he steered defense research funding toward time-sharing, computer networks, and interactive systems. Britannica notes that under his influence ARPA became “the birthplace not only of time-sharing systems like Project MAC, computer networks like ARPANET and later the Internet, but also of computer graphics, parallel processing, computer flight simulation, and other key achievements.”
Licklider is remembered less for any single machine than for the people and projects he chose to fund. His belief that close coupling between people and computers would improve decision-making influenced the laboratories that produced much of modern interactive and networked computing.