"As We May Think" Vannevar Bush - Notes and Response

First, who is Vannevar Bush? 

Wikipedia tells us....
(1890-1974) He was an American engineer who lived during WW2. He headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development. "His office was considered one of the key factors in winning the war." 

#Tags: 

• Analog computers
• Raytheon (American defense contractor and industrial corporation with core manufacturing concentrations in defense systems and defense and commercial electronics)
• Memex ("memory"+"index" an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web)
• Profile trancer
• Differential Analyzer (analog computer that solved differential equations)
• Digital circuit design theory
• First presidential science advisor

-source

"As We May Think" was published in The Atlantic in 1945 (before the nuclear attacks on Japan) (it was republished that same year, after the attacks). "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified," he says in the piece.  

#Tags: 

• Destruction vs. Understanding -- his perceptions about the direction of technology
• Collective memory machine
• Turning information into knowledge

-source (sorry, it's Wikipedia too)


Summary: Quotes & Paraphrases from  "As We May Think"

Editor's note: Bush was among the first to grasp that technology can head toward making tasks easier for the human mind, as before they had made only physical tasks easier.

"First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have
improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence."  Machines have made our bodies stronger #physicallabor #health #medicine #mentalhealth

Science and research foster the best communication between individuals: "It has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual." Specialists are needed to sift through all this information. And now we need to be able to bridge the gap between disciplines.

"...publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record."

Attempts had been made (Leibnitz's calculating machine, Babbage's analytical machine) but it wasn't cost- or time-efficient.

He predicts many improvements for photography as an example of a technology that has much room for growth.

Machines have got "repetitive thought" down, but there still lack machines for "mature" or "creative thought."  Even those existing still stand for much improvement in speed. But there is still a need for the need for Bush's hypothetical technologies. "...the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population," he says.

"Thus far we seem to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This 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 his inheritance of acquired knowledge."

He proposes ideas that sound a lot like command+F or voice recognition for selection - making it easier to FIND information.

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." Sounds like a hard drive!

He uses the word trail ... it signifies the stream of links from different sources, and he seems to mean it as a stream of consciousness. Earlier, he made a statement that human thoughts are not linear, but web-like and driven on associations. But these trails, unlike a human stream of consciousness, does not fade. 

For example, a friend tries to explain a thought that he made a trail of earlier -- "In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.

Translation: Friend recalls memory of something he read up on in the past. He takes his friend through the bookmark of sites he read at the time. Then, he emails the bookmark file to the friend so he can access the links on his own browsers.

"There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record," Bush predicts. Little does he know, that activity will hardly be considered a profession in the future -- instead, a basic, required skill. Those best at this skill, we call professors. The worst, simply bloggers.

Here is where his ideas begin to surpass current technologies. "Is it not 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?" 


Response and Comparison to "Blueprints of the Afterlife"
Bush was getting at the idea of an implanted Internet. He says that the ability one would have with future technology to objectify information in one's life should lift a person's spirit. One should be able to rest his overburdened mind because he can store memories elsewhere, forget about them, and recall them if ever he needs to (sounds like a good counter-argument to Plato's beef with the transition from orality to literacy.) Technology will give people the means to living better-examined and healthier lives. 

This thinking reminds me of the same respite that the Industrial Revolution was predicted to bring to housewives. With so many new appliances for cooking and cleaning, a housewife hoped to finish her chores sooner, having more time for chosen pleasures. On the contrary, the expectation for a cleaner house – especially since it was so easy to achieve with new tools – demanded that women spend more time and energy on those tasks than their mothers did. (Sorry I don't have a source for this – this argument came up in a freshman architecture class I took from Ayad Rahmani called "The Build Environment.")

Knowing what we do now of technologies, Bard's predictions are narrowly optimistic. Science fiction author Ryan Boudinot describes a dystopian world armed with the implanted Internet Bush theorizes in his novel "Blueprints of the Afterlife."
(No spoil alert – I highly recommend reading this book if you're a DTC major)

Boudinot names it the Bionet. It gives a user access to all the Internet's information, plugged into a part of the brain associated with the subconscious. In the book, people in the future who have Bionet implants risk becoming "embodiments" -- versions of themselves that a DJ has hacked and now controls, sometimes not to the host's knowledge. Boudinot exaggerates a type of present day identity theft or brainwashing to such an extreme that individuals lose control of their data, their bodies, and eventually their minds. 

A feature of the Bionet grants Boudinot's characters the ability to remove painful, unwanted, or unnecessary memories and stored them on chips. At times, characters re-access the memories when needed for reflection or problem-solving. In Boudinot's futuristic dystopia, the characters who log away painful memories can never truly escape the original pain. 

In our real present world, there are obvious advantages that technology and the Internet have made to our spirits. But they are often accompanied by feelings of insignificance, depression, misinformation, intolerance, and desensitization (to name only a minor few that I have personally felt). 

Bush had good intentions with his theorization of the would-be Internet, but indeed -- the Net Generation/Millienials/Generation X has been scoffed at by those older for being less intelligent and lazier than they. We never finish books or memorize things we can look up. Why would we commit those things to memory when we have e-books + the find key, bookmarked web pages, or simply an Internet search engine? The new generation sees that with all the accessible information, it would be impossible to thoroughly memorize entire concepts like our parents were required to. I'm getting onto another issue here... see my blog from October on Don Tapscott's "Grown Up Digital" for more on the generation gap.

The Internet has definitely facilitated the type of life Bush aspires technology to provide. It is incredible how far ahead of his time Bush was. But if he thought war and physical destruction were the only negative possible consequences, his big thinking neglected the smaller, more obscure inflictions and vices that technology has brought upon our species – and indeed, our collective memory.