As We May Think
Written in 1945 at the end of World War II, Dr. Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think may be one of the most important historical “sign posts” pointing towards where we are today, imagining the role that post-war scientists would play in improving every day life. Even then, with the advances made in the first few decades of the twentieth century one could grasp that, as Bush wrote:
The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
Bush’s essay is a cornucopia of ideas for how technology will transform our lives. Almost everything he describes we have some version of today, albeit the mechanisms are quite different from those that he imagined being created out of early twentieth century technologies. But Bush wasn’t a science fiction writer, he was an MIT professor, a presidential advisor and during the war headed the US office of scientific research and development which contributed a number of technologies crucial to winning the war including radar, proximity fuses, and starting the Manhattan Project which developed the first atomic weapons.
One part of Bush’s essay outlines an early conceptualization of artificial intelligence which Bush calls a memex – “It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.” Bush’s memex is designed to augment human memory and thinking by storing all of human knowledge and providing “associative” access which he describes as being an essential characteristic of the machine – “whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another.”
This is one of the earliest ideas for how a machine might statistically evaluate information in order to derive insights and contribute to our human thought process. Elsewhere in the essay Bush applies this idea of augmentation in his vision for mathematical calculation - describing how machines would free people from the rote repetitive manipulation of numbers and allow them to concentrate on higher order thinking.
How we got here: Bush played a key role in the application of science to warfare, including the development of nuclear technology that still represents the greatest manmade existential threat to our species. And yet in the immediate shadow of the war he was able to imagine how our lives would be made immeasurably better through technology. As he says at the close of his article: “Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.” Scientific advancement has in part depended upon people such as Bush who could set out a visionary aspirational path and inspire the next generation to turn those visions into our reality.