J. C. R. Licklider

American psychologist and computer scientist whose 1960 essay on human–computer partnership, and whose funding decisions at the Pentagon's research agency, set the course of interactive computing, early AI research and the network that became the internet. In 'Man-Computer Symbiosis' (1960) he argued that, for the decades before machines could think on their own, the most productive arrangement would be close, real-time cooperation in which people set goals and judge results while computers do routine work, an early statement of intelligence augmentationintelligence augmentation, n.: Using computers to make people smarter and more capable rather than building machines that think on their own: AI as a tool for human minds.. As the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) from 1962, he funded time-sharing and large, open-ended research programs at MIT (Project MAC, which housed the AI group of Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky, prop. n.: An American AI pioneer who helped launch the field and MIT's AI laboratory, co-wrote a famous critique of early neural networks, and pictured the mind as a society of many simple parts.), Stanford and the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon) that sustained American AI research for a decade, and his memos on an 'intergalactic computer network' anticipated the ARPANET. He later directed Project MAC (1968–1970) and returned to ARPA in 1974–75.