Lick was, of course, thinking about real time interactive computing. Computers would effectively and quickly do routine work. Processing speed and easy user interfaces would allow humans to interact with computers in making decisions instead of simply responding to long-awaited output. This way of computing would mean that problems would not have to be formulated in depth in advance because computers would be able to respond to changing variables. Lick's proposed system would not use the traditional batch processing methods, but rather the time sharing method, which gives many users at individual terminals access to a large mainframe.
Users thus interact directly with the computer instead of relying on technicians and punch cards.
Results are obtained immediately. Man Computer Symbiosis was inspired by an informal experiment Lick conducted with himself as the subject. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs, and other hours into instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so.