“As We May Think”
by Vannevar Bush
This article was published in The Atlantic magazine in 1945. The author proposes ways that scientists can turn their attention to “the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.” He calls for the development of tools that are an extension of the mind rather than the body. It’s interesting to read this article with the 67-year perspective I have on the state of consumer technology. Some of the author’s ideas foreshadow the development of personal computing devices. Although we have made significant progress since the time this article was written, some of Dr. Bush’s observations still ring true today.
Notes:
- “new instruments…have increased [man’s] control of his material environment.” (sec.1 p.2)
- Leibnitz’s calculating machine couldn’t be produced at the time because “the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all if could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper.” (sec.1 p.3)
- “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” (sec.1 p.3)
- Regarding the possibility for dictation > printed records: “All he needs to do is to take advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter his language.” (sec.2 p.5)
- Voder, Vocoder, Stenotype
- “…let the vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to.” (sec.3 p.6)
- “For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.” (sec.3 p.6)
- Cool old machine: a harmonic synthesizer that predicts the tides (sec.4 p.7)
- Mathematicians: “intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs.” (sec.4 p.8)
- Regarding the inability to access the gigantic record of knowledge in a search-engine like way: “There is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by the inheritance of acquired knowledge. The prince action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed.” (sec.5 p.8)
- Regarding being able to filter data by multiple criteria: “When data of any sort are placed in storage…It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used;” (sec.6 p.10)
- “The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.” (sec.6 p.10)
- Suggests a hypothetical device that’s like a computer, called a “memex”: (sec.6 p.10)
- “mechanized private file and library”
- can be “consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility”
- “it is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory”
- it’s a desk, or piece of furniture that has screens on which information is projected
- buttons, levers
- “Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest of mechanism.”
- “Associative indexing”: “whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of typing two items together is the important thing.” (sec.7 p.11)
- “Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race.” (sec.8 p.12)
- “All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses – the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?” (sec.8 p.12)
- Bone conduction introduces sounds to deaf people. “Is it no possible that we may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form?” (sec.8 p.13)
- “In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to teh form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another?” (sec.8 p.13)