Some research estimates that generating a typical e-mail using A.I. Consumes a bottle’s worth of water to siphon heat away from the data centers’ servers to separate cooling towers.

I will use any means necessary to achieve quality typography and clear communication,

The comforting tone of Altman and Ive’s pitch belies the enormous uncertainty of what their plan would unleash.

Altman and Ive are positioning their device as a solution to screen fatigue. They promise that their gadget will free us from technology, as evinced by their softly smiling faces in their joint portrait and the warmth and companionship of the café in which they conducted their video interview. But we will only get to this appealingly humane place, they imply, by adopting more technology—their technology.

If we all started using our personal A.I. Machines dozens of times a day, as we do our iPhones, the environmental toll of our personal technology would skyrocket—imagine something like turning every car on the road into a diesel truck. This, in turn, would warp the direction of global economies, requiring the construction of ever-larger data centers.

Imitation is the sincerest form of theft, and most every web author starts by stealing.

The little pendants around our necks will be a hundred million Trojan horses, smuggling A.I. Into every aspect of our lives.

The involvement of Ive invites inevitable comparisons with the iPhone, but this is not necessarily a compliment; to many of us, an iPhone of A.I. Sounds less like a utopian promise than like a threat that A.I. Will soon become ubiquitous and unavoidable.

Fredkin and others at BB&N had the PDP-1 set up so that J.C.R. Licklider could directly interact with it. Instead of programming via boxes of punched cards over a period of days, it became possible to feed the programs and data to the machine via a high-speed paper tape; it was also possible to change the paper tape input while the program was running. The operator could interact with the machine for the first time. (The possibility of this kind of interaction was duly noted by a few other people who turned out to be influential figures in computer history. A couple of other young computerists at MIT, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, were also using a PDP-1 in ways computers weren’t usually used.)

[J.C.R. Licklider’s] observations revealed that about 85% of his “thinking” time was actually spent “getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it.”

When [J.C.R. Licklider] couldn’t find any time-and-motion studies of information-shuffling researchers like himself, Licklider decided to keep track of his own activities as he went through his normal working day. “Although I was aware of the inadequacy of the sampling,” he later wrote, with the modesty that he is known for among his colleagues, “I served as my own subject.”

[J.C.R. Licklider] felt that he was spending most of his time putting things into files or taking them out,

[J.C.R. Licklider] realized that the management of complexity was the main problem to be solved during the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. Machines would have to help us keep track of the complications of keeping global civilization alive and growing. And humans were going to need new ways of attacking the big problems that would result form our continued existence and growth.

The information processing equipment, for its part, will convert hypotheses into testable models and then test the models against data (which the human operator may designate roughly and identify as relevant when the computer presents them for his approval). The equipment will answer questions. It will simulate the mechanisms and models, carry out procedures, and display the results to the operator. It will transform data, plot graphs, (“cutting the cake” in whatever way the human operator specifies, or in several alternative ways if the human operator is not sure what he wants). The equipment will interpolate, extrapolate, and transform. It will convert static equations or logical statements into dynamic models so the human operator can examine their behavior. In general, it will carry out the routinizable, clerical operations that fill the intervals between decisions.

J.C.R. Licklider found himself drawn to the idea of a kind of computation that was more dynamic, more of a dialogue

J.C.R. Licklider began to think about a system that included both the electronic powers of the computer and the cortical powers of the human operator. The crude interaction between the operator and the PDP-1 might be just the beginning of a powerful new kind of human-computer partnership.

J.C.R. Licklider discovered what he and others who were close to developments in electronics came to call “the rule of two”: Continuing miniaturization of its most important components means that the cost effectiveness of computer hardware doubles every two years.

The computerized library as [J.C.R. Licklider] first described it in his book did not involve anything as extravagant as giving an entire computer to every person who used it. Instead he described a setup, the technical details of which he left to the future, by which different humans could use remote extensions of a central computer, all at the same time.

“The PDP-1 opened me up to ideas about how people and machines like this might operate in the future,” J.C.R. Licklider recalled in 1983, “but I never dreamed at first that it would ever become economically feasible to give everybody their own computer.”

Although [J.C.R. Licklider] didn’t know how or when computers would become powerful enough and cheap enough to serve as “thinking tools,” he began to realize that the general-purpose computer, if it was set up in such a way that humans could interact with it directly, could evolve into something entirely different from the data processors and number crunchers of the 1950s.

J.C.R. Licklider wondered if the best arrangement for both the human and the human-created symbol-processing entities on this planet might not turn out to be neither a master-slave relationship nor an uneasy truce between competitors, but a partnership.