Article One: What did you think of “As We May Think”?
In 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published an article by Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush called on his fellow scientists to develop new tools to record and organize the wealth of their knowledge. Bush wrote: ” The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”
What do you think of Bush’s ideas? What technologies did he anticipate with accuracy and which would be useful inventions today? Have we developed adequate tools to access and evaluate new scientific developments? Or is our world much the same as what Bush saw in 1945, too much information, poorly organized.
This article is available for student access in Blackboard/Documents/Week One. Please post your thoughts on this article by noon, Monday, January 14. I encourage you to bring in - and link to - alternative points of view, to read the comments of others and to respond to those in your individual posts.
January 13th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I think Bush’s ideas were generally spot-on, despite their dated, clunky feel. Overall, Bush accurately predicts today’s technological developments.
We have digital cameras, much like the dry photography that he deems so important. Granted, our technology is far beyond what he predicted—there’s no walnut-shaped device with a cord attached. (Perhaps there is somewhere, but the average Joe has a digital camera.) He also accurately presumed that photography would be vital in documenting information—just look at National Geographic and the various other publications that use photos to educate. And that’s not even getting into satellite photography, which was probably not on Bush’s mind when he was extolling the virtues of dry photography.
We also have microfilm—the old school version of the Internet and the plot device of horror movie writers everywhere. His ideas about storing information on film also call to mind even more modern inventions, like the Kindle. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000FI73MA/ref=pd_sl_aw_manual-1_kindle1_40650458_1
Bush’s assertion that some day, “ library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk” comes close to Amazon’s description of the Kindle, “you can be anywhere, think of a book, and get it in one minute.” Bush, however, did not envision such sophisticated technology.
Still, some of the futuristic technology that Bush dreamed of is not as important as he thought yet. For example, he was a little off on his Vocoder prediction. We do have voice-recognition software. I know this because I frequently shout at Julie, the robot teller at 1-800-RAIL. Still, I’m not certain that we use it that frequently when we write. At least, I don’t know many people that do. Although, there is this technology on the market. http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/
Out of all of Bush’s ideas, his almost exacting description of the modern computer was the most striking. According to a Timeline of Computer History found on the Computer History Museum’s Web site, there were already reports outlining how a computer could store information in 1945. http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1945
So, I suppose the concept that Bush spoke of was already out there. Still, his description of how information could be linked together is very similar to how the Internet works.
Furthermore, Bush outlines a world where we leave information trails, readily available and easy to recall. We have indeed achieved that world—much to the chagrin of some. Thanks to the Internet, our life is spread out for any tech-savvy person to find—e-mails, phone calls, grades, bills, and hobbies. Now, private life has become public.
As to whether these tools have helped the scientific method—they have, I assume. Thanks to the Internet, scientists from around the world can reach each other and share ideas. A vast store of information is at the fingertips of anyone with access to a computer. Still, we are swamped in information, just as Bush was. The Internet is full of lies, mistakes, etc. It is a vast pool of information that one must learn to navigate, as we are all discovering while working on our blogs.
Sometimes greater access makes information harder to find. It’s information overload. I think that is where we are today. We have so much information and so many viewpoints at our disposal that we’re paralyzed by the prospect of wading through it thoroughly. I think we are at the stage where the Web almost echoes the real world—a digital mess of information rather than a physical one.
January 13th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
I thought this article was fascinating for its prescience and level of detail. Bush could have simply demanded that post-war physicists turn their efforts toward creating an efficient system for classification and retrieval of information. Instead, he took it about 40 steps ahead and detailed the mechanisms by which technology might someday make our lives better. In some respects, he was eerily on: digital (“dry”) photography allowing the user to immediately view his snapshot; voice-to-text and text-to-voice software; personal calculators and complex formulaic programs for researchers, to free up their minds from repetitive calculations; and even the internet, a take on Bush’s “Memex,” in which users create their own trail of noteworthy information on a topic, with “links” to diversions and other tangential information. Sounds a bit like Wikipedia!
I noticed that fairly often, Bush suggested that these future technologies would take the form of furniture; he suggested the Memex be in the form of a desk. This reminded me of Microsoft’s super-fancy Surface, unveiled in 2007. Here’s one of their previews:
January 13th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Not sure the embedded YouTube video worked. Here’s a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP5y7yp06n0
January 13th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
I agree that some of Bush’s predictions sound like things we have today: digital cameras, Wikipedia and even Google, which, like the “memex,” “stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”
I’m not sure that the Microsoft Surface, as cool-looking as it is, will be that successful. Portability is the important factor in modern technology, evidenced by more people buying laptops instead of desktops: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-adv.sun.abizsun3jan13,0,5009701.story
(My parents are shopping for a new computer, and my mom wants a laptop, even though she and my dad don’t take any technology with them on the road besides a cell phone.)
The most interesting part of this article to me was Bush’s comparison of
“selection by association” to selection by “indexing.” In my classes as an undergraduate English major, I heard professors say that the nonlinear way of thinking that predominates on the Internet - when you start out clicking on one icon and find yourself at a vastly different Web site two hours later, not knowing how you got there - could transform how people read and write. Stories may no longer have a clear beginning, middle and end - instead, people could enter the plot at any point and leave at any point, getting what they want out of it without needing the whole thing.
I’m interested to see what that could mean for journalists and how we write articles and create multimedia stories.
January 13th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
In “As We May Think,” Bush imagines a massive but efficient system for accessing information, laying the theoretical groundwork for what would later become the World Wide Web. As a scientist, Bush sees the future-Web as “a mechanized private file and library,” a streamlined avenue for academic research that would mimic the human tendency to index information by association rather than strict logic.
Bush’s model is a response to a growing need for organization and accessibility: people have the means to make a huge amount of information (the “record”) conveniently portable but at the time had no efficient way to sift through it. Bush addresses this problem by describing virtual “trails” that would connect a string of relevant information – these trails are present in today’s Web as hyperlinks between related pages.
Bush also goes beyond the system’s technological aspects and considers the social benefits of having better access to records of the past: “Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.”
His description of the memex touches on many of the basic cornerstones of today’s Web: search engines (the user first “runs through an encyclopedia”); browser bookmarks (the “trails do not fade” if the user wishes to consult them later); and user comments (the user “inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item”).
It is interesting that Bush’s version of the Web acts almost exclusively as a reference and research tool rather than a means of communication and a public exchange of ideas.
January 13th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Bush had a lot of foresight in writing this article. In a very abstract way, he predicted the developments that would be the framework for mass communication online and databasing.
He touches on a lot of different developments, but one of the most interesting was the storage of data. He writes,
“A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted. Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography, followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on magnetic wires. Even if utterly new recording procedures do not appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of modification and extension.”
The wax disks have developed into CDs, which appear to be taking their place in history as better digital forms of data storage push them out of the way.
One of the inventions that he witnessed and had hopes for was the machine that produced audible speech at a World Fair. This has developed into voice recognition software that is used in a variety of capacities.
When we call our bank and a human doesn’t answer, voice recognition software is what gets us through the menus (whether we like it or not). People with disabilities depend on voice recognition software to go to the ATM or transmit their thoughts via computer, so he was right on in seeing the innovativeness of having the voice recognition run both ways.
I agree with Cathy on the portability note. I think the desk that does everything might have been a good idea back then because people weren’t on the move as much. But now people want to work from the plane, the subway, the kitchen, the classroom, or wherever else they can prop a laptop up.
January 13th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
I can’t remember reading any article that gave me more “Oh my God!” moments than this one. Bush’s spot-on predictions, along with his depth of analysis, are mind-blowing — and not just because this was written more than 60 years ago.
One issue Bush mentioned, but never fully explored, was the fact that this ease of entering and storing information would lead to a massive expansion of the amount of information actually being created. As the Carlson article mentioned, no one truly anticipated how popular email would become, but it makes sense - the more difficult it is to get your message out there, the less likely you are to create a message; meaning with more ease of communication comes more actually communicatING.
Something I couldn’t help thinking while reading this was, “Where are we headed now? And is anyone even thinking about that in terms this specific?” I fully realize that every generation has sort of felt that their level of technological advancement was the highest and best it could ever be, and the general public couldn’t even imagine how things could get much better. But I can’t help feeling that, to some extent - technology can only get so small, right? And so fast, right? I guess I’m an old fart, but really!
Anyway, I thought Andrea’s comparison of Bush’s desk to the new Microsoft Surface was really interesting - I had pictured Bush’s idea as a very early and very primitive computer, but it seems Microsoft is attempting, in a way, to send us back to the days when computers were too large to move around. I agree with cguiles that this might not be the most practical tool in terms of every individual consumer having one (the way everyone has a laptop), but I can see this becoming a fixture in libraries, offices and higher-income homes - one Surface that several people share. We’ll see.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:02 am
This video, made in 1965, includes some similarly impressive predictions of what online shopping will be like in the distant future: 1999.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XxKORHKcjg
I also found a great parody of the video Andrea posted above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY
January 14th, 2008 at 12:17 am
It’s quite incredible how well Bush predicted future technologies — the “dry photography,” a scanning device and even an early prototype of a credit card. Perhaps the most impressive thing he discusses is the use of punch-card technology, which turned out to be used in computers from the 1960s through the early ’80s.
Bush stresses the importance of developing a way to organize and index information so that important knowledge is not overlooked. However, when he talks about seeking information using the Memex, he suggests that the user would find the information using a code for a specific book. Having to consult a code book doesn’t sound very user-friendly. I would imagine that Bush would be pleased to learn about the use of keywords to search through documents.
As Rob said, it is somewhat surprising (to a modern mind) that Bush’s concept of a Memex was soley for the purpose of reference and was isolated technology, without a means of locating more information. Bush assumes that each person using a Memex will own enough books and other resources to act as sufficient materials for a given project. Did he believe that everyone that had a Memex would have the financial ability to own his own library?
It is also interesting that Bush seems to suggest that much of the future advances in technology will be used primarily by certain groups of people rather than by the public as a whole. He says the “camera hound” will have the walnut-sized camera and suggests that other technology will be used by researchers and scientists. And so as impressive and correct as his ideas were, he didn’t seem to fully grasp the huge influence the technology could have on society.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:30 am
I echo my classmates in saying I greatly admire Bush’s foresight. Yet at the same time I am puzzled at how he achieved such vision into the future and saw the natural progression these technologies would make. I wonder if it was an easier task 40+ years ago to see into the future because the technological map was less fragmented. Today, I can hardly imagine what will likely be commonplace next year. I couldn’t have predicted the advent of mp3s and iPods when I was happily rocking out to my walkman.
I know technology will continue to progress, but I wonder – like others in this class – where does it end? Even as I type this I know the answer is likely: never. When we have reached the highest form of perfection with digital photography, what will be its replacement? I am sure it is being developed in a lab somewhere. Will people continue to jump on the band-wagon of whatever new technology comes out? iPhone anyone? My computer I bought for class at Medill has “blue ray disc technology” – I don’t even know what that means, but I am guessing its replacement is already trickling down the assembly line.
In the age of newer, better, faster, stronger – will we ever be satisfied? Could Bush have predicted this? If he thought there was too much information then, what would he say now? Now that there is so much information that people find it perfectly acceptable to live an apathetic life. Literally turning away from world news, presidential elections and disasters because it is all so bad they just don’t want to know.
If Bush thought his world was too disorganized to be effective I shudder to think of his reaction now. You can find news told in any way you want to hear (from any viewpoint you want to believe) and Web blogs on any topic under the sun giving you information that may or may not be truth. While I praise free speech and the ability of anyone now to make their voice heard – how much is too much? Have we so much choice that we can no longer see?
January 14th, 2008 at 3:02 am
It was almost eerie reading Bush’s predictions for future technologies. My favorite device was the memex. A person could keep all their records and communications on it and locate those files with “exceeding speed and flexibility.” The memex sounds like a version of the modern-day computer.
Bush was dead-on with his commentary that there is so much information out there in the world but so little of it gets retrieved. He used science to make his point here. Data must be consulted and “continuously extended” when doing scientific research. The scientist needs to read up on previous works so as not to duplicate someone else’s efforts, and then add on his findings to the pool of research.
Bush noted that the primary problem with accessing the information is how people select the information. The indexing system doesn’t work so well because the human brain works via association – much like following links from Web page to Web page. You can click on a link for dessert recipes, then move to comments about a dessert and then view pictures of it on another page.
Cathy’s comment about nonlinear thinking made me think about the things my newspaper design professor used to say in undergrad. As print majors, we all thought the optimum way of telling a story was to write it. Wrong! Nonlinear storytelling gives readers multiple entry points into a story. Instead of reading it from start to finish, they can start with the photo and then listen to an audio sidebar and look at an infographic. This interactive form of storytelling allows the viewer to decide what they want to look at, instead of forcing them to follow a set story path. The viewer is able to take away what they want from the story.
January 14th, 2008 at 4:10 am
With the exception of mind-reading probes implanted in our skulls, Bush’s technological trajectory was remarkably accurate. That most of his prophecies have come true is a testament to human ingenuity. We now enjoy access to a body of information that is growing exponentially, and which can be located instantly through the simple use of a search engine. I’m both thrilled and terrified.
Bush writes that “man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems… His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.”
Two things alarm me about this passage. First, the web has served as a democratizing force by giving people the opportunity to be heard, yet the voices we hear and read on the web are becoming increasingly anonymous. What we’ve gained by opening up the floor to everyone, we’ve perhaps lost in accountability. Though we enjoy broader access to information about our “shady past … and …present problems” I fear we may soon lose our ability to attribute value to these pieces of information.
Second, I feel the diffusion of information on the web, and the assurance that it can be retrieved again at the click of a mouse, has indeed allowed us the “privilige of forgetting.” But I wonder if by doing so we are advancing the degeneration of a critical function of our brains, long-term memory. If we think non-linearly, do we not tend to forget how we got from point A to point B? If you don’t exercise a body part, it will wither and die. I feel I am better informed about the world around me, but I fear one side effect of this is my lackadaisical hippocampus.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:54 am
I actually forwarded the section about photography to a photographer friend of mine. The line about being able to see the photograph instantly gave me a weird, nerdly shiver.
I guess what impressed me most about the article was Bush’s admission that this was just one way in which technology could go, based on the technology current at the time. To me, that was the eeriest part of the whole thing. Everything today talks about the Internet as The Future, just like people used to talk about TV as the future and radio as the future and telegraph machines as the future. It takes a smart guy to realize something new may come along and blow all predictions out of the water.
Like Andrea, I was fascinated by the prescience and detail in the article. More than that, though, I was amused by where he got it wrong. I’m not being condescending to Dr. Bush, obviously a very intelligent, remarkable thinker. He broke down existing technologies by way of the needs they served and extrapolated how best those needs could be served in the future. But he still took some stuff for granted.
I was especially amused by his description of future supercomputers, particularly the means for entering data.
“One of [the computers] will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes.”
Bush predicted future technology with often-eerie accuracy, but even he couldn’t have predicted the societal changes of the last half of the 20th century.
January 14th, 2008 at 11:33 am
I marvel at the amazing accuracy with which Bush describes our current technologies 60 years before they were invented, modified and commonly used. We are definitely a generation of people who have access to more knowledge than any other previously. However, the cost of being able to attain such information at the click of a button is a bit disturbing.
Bush was dead-on when he said, “[Man] has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory.” However, the technologies Bush mentions, most of which we have today, push us toward another extreme. We now have so much information at our fingertips that we are bogged down by our reliance on our mechanized records.
Ask the average cell phone user how many numbers in his contacts list are memorized. They will probably be able to rattle off a handful out of hundreds. Countless times my friends have sent Facebook messages begging for the phone number of everyone they ever knew because they broke or lost their old phone. Bush is correct that advancing technology has allowed us the “privilege of forgetting,” but I fear we are now abusing that privilege by replacing our natural memories with our computers and calculators.
Bush says, “The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein.” I would have to disagree. Our heavy-handed use is becoming borderline gluttonous. I see society taking advantage of science like a child with a sweet tooth locked in a candy store overnight. As good as it is, backlash will occur, be it a stomach ache for the child or increasing dependence on artificial memory for society. It is lovely not to have to remember a phone number every once in a while, but sometimes I miss my computer from back in the day: my brain.
January 14th, 2008 at 11:52 am
It is interesting to read Bush’s description of something that could exist in the future and compare it to the actual item that we are used to using in our lives. It is humbling to think how easy it is for us to send and retrieve information in a manner similar to the one Bush hopes will exist one day, and how much information we have available to us from a source, in some cases smaller than a deck of cards e.g. the iphone. “The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk.”
He touched on many inventions that exist today, although not necessarily exactly how he envisioned them. For example, “The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice,” sounds similar to a camera phone. Although not attached to our forehead, it is readily accessible and can be transferred to a computer capable of enlarging the picture.
Also, “Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?” This sounds, to me, very much like the research that is happening now and is described in this article for Current Opinion in Neurobiology:, “Recent studies show that motor parameters, such as hand trajectory, and cognitive parameters, such as the goal and predicted value of an action, can be decoded from the recorded activity to provide control signals. Neural prosthetics that use simultaneously a variety of cognitive and motor signals can maximize the ability of patients to communicate and interact with the outside world.”
There is some truth to the theory that there is too much information for people to easily process, however, computers have made it much easier to find relevant scientific research, for example, than it was for Bush. Pub Med is a great tool for finding research that has been done on specific subject and linking to similar research papers.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I agree with Heather in that it seems like Bush’s Memex doesn’t appeal to a wide enough audience. It would work for people, like historians or scientists, who have both the interest and the money to purchase this type of equipment and all of the references needed to build the library.
His primitive model, I think, would have been useful in libriaries and schools, but I don’t think it would have been economically feasible to make that type of equipment at the time. Interestingly, he talks about economics and lack of resources being the cause of early computing machines failing. I think the same logic could be used to discount the necessity of the Memex machine.
Many are drawing comparisons between the Memex and the Internet. While there are certainly parallels between the two, such as calling up only pertinent information (through a search engine) or linking together similar topics, I think Bush leaves out one very important idea that has made the Internet thrive: the general public.
The Memex wouldn’t have been available to the general public because most probably didn’t have the funds to purchase their own libraries, let alone a machine to organize them. What makes the Internet successful is the sharing of information and the public input people can have on that information.
That’s the direction journalism is heading in as well. People want interactivity. What in the “old days” of journalism was writing a letter to the editor is now commenting on online stories or writing your own blog on the topic to provide opinion. It’s not just about producing multi-platform stories; it’s about allowing the user to interact with it.
At a very basic level, let the user e-mail it to a friend or link to it on Facebook. On other levels, provide them with a quiz to test their knowledge on the subject or a survey to gauge public interest. An example: On a story about a presidential debate, create a quiz that ranks which candidate the user most agrees with on certain issues. You could also link to maps to give the user a better picture of something, etc.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I like that Bush points out that none of the advancements in information-organizing that had been accomplished or that he predicted would be accomplished could be so widely distributed or even possible without those first advancements that improved the efficiency of manual labor. He predicted a new stage in the evolution of inventions, but he recognized that those previous steps were the foundation of the future. For what new devices will today’s advancements become the building blocks?
Bush comes across a remaining stumbling block when he remarks that the “clumsy way in which we have learned to write figures” has complicated the way we make calculations by machines. The complexity of language seems to be one factor technology still has yet to master. Though it does now exist, any widely distributed voice-recognition software I’ve used cannot be trusted to create an accurate record.
Bush should find the English system of spelling atrocious. Any software I’ve seen that vocalizes text horribly mispronounces our non-phoenetic words. And beyond that, it cannot convey the emotion present in the human voice.
Furthermore, there are so many languages in the world that many of them are left out when new technology is developed. Simple computing classes in other countries become part language lessons. People don’t always realize the considerable power of having the latest advancements and programs all available in your native tongue, of learning programming languages based on a language you already speak written in a script you’ve grown up reading.
Bush suggests a way around this: Eliminate the middleman. He writes, “The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand? …Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another?”
It’s far out, but would it ever be possible to communicate the full range of human thought without language? Such a thing could create greater mutual understanding and equality among all people. What would we lose?
January 14th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Bush writes about the dire consequences of failing to store and arrange adequately the accumulated knowledge of modernity. The threat is best expressed in his discussion of Mendel’s pea experiments:
“Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.”
The solution the article proposes is a better, more efficient way for people to organize information they encounter. However this does not appear to solve the Mendel problem. There is no evidence that Mendel’s discoveries were ignored because those who had read about them could not remember them accurately. The problem was that not enough people came to appreciate the pea experiments. This is essentially a challenge of dissemination not recall.
As others have already observed, the “memex” system bears striking similarities to aspects of the internet and search engines that have become staples of modern information organization and gathering. But there is a key difference that Bush was unable to anticipate: the collaborative advantage of the internet. Google, for one, constantly aggregates the recommendations of all its users and the websites it searches to improve its results. In this way, a brilliant insight on the Web can pick up momentum as people who recognize its power pass it along and sites like Google give it increased importance. Ideally the notion is that one good thought can circulate the world, garnering the recognition it deserves.
But would this prevent a repetition of the Mendel scenario? I worry that it would not. The supposition now by many people is that important information will come to them. If it is not at the top of their Google search, in their e-mail inboxes or featured on nytimes.com, they feel it isn’t worth searching out. And that is obviously not true. The new threat is overconfidence in our information gathering abilities.
January 14th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
While Bush’s article is exciting in that within it we can recognize many of the tenants of our daily lives, it has this feel of the old boys school making the decisions for the “better of humanity” all over again.
As intelligent as this man absolutely was there is something about his postwar mentality, that lives distaste in my mouth. It’s almost as he is smoking a foul smelling cigar, preaching about technology and patting those typing girls on the bottom for their good behavior.
To say that science replaced religion is hyperbolic but there is a way in which you can just see scientists making themselves into the monks/saints of the future.
One of those most telling quotes of this article is his comment, “It is strange that the inventors of universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing one which better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording speech.”
Being a scientist he sees language as something made by inventors rather than a cultural production arising from necessity.
Bush’s readiness to thrust logical processes into the clanking levers of the machines he imagines seems tied with an extremely nationalistic progressive vision of technology and history. In his discussion he leaves little space for the independence of the human creativity, which he briefly touches on. These machines, to him, are not created by men (filled with the prejudice and flaws that mankind necessarily has) but rather seem to be created out of logic alone. Oh, and a little work on the scientists part.
“Whenever logical processes of thought are employed—that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine,” argued Bush.
Since this is written on the morning after World War Two, it seems uncompressible to me that he does not discuss technology’s role in the “logical” murder of the Jews by the Germans. All of us are far to familiar with Hitler’s famous desire for living space that he claimed came out of a national logic. This distasteful logic, created a massive indexing system by IBM, that made it much easier to enact genocide than in the past. Here is a link for those of you unfamiliar with this http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/.
In short thought that “runs along an accepted groove” is often called mob mentality.
I would like to add that this man who can see into the future was unable to envision a world where women would be anything but girls typing away.
“One of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes,” he writes.
Because in the old boys club, women are not endowed with logic so they were will never have a real role in cultural production other than typing. Puff. Puff.