Hi, I found it interesting to read in the announcement of the new MIT center the following sentence:

The center's director, Thomas W. Malone, cited Google and Wikipedia as inspiration for the center. He said the basic research question there would be "How can people and computers be connected so that, collectively, they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?"

JCR Licklider in his 1960 paper, "Man-Computer Symbiosis" (http://ais.org/~jrh/licklider/man-computer_symbiosis.htmll) presented a vision for the direction human computer interaction would take, not the hope of Artificial Intelligence that computers would outstrip humans but the sense computers and humans would enhance each other's possibilities. He wrote: "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." Many researchers who contributed to the development of first the ARPANET and then the Internet cite this early paper as inspirational. It seems like JCR Licklider's influence continues. Take care. Jay