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  • Men are noisy, narrow-band devices, but their nervous systems have very many parallel and simultaneously active channels. Relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of "programming themselves contingently" on the basis of newly received information. Computing machines are single-minded, constrained by their "pre-programming."

    J. C. R. Licklider, Robert W. Taylor (1990). “In memoriam, J.C.R. Licklider, 1915-1990”
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