As We May Think - Vannevar Bush

As We May Think

Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush coordinated the activities of America's technological development during World War II as the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. It was a significant role as he had jurisdiction of over 6,000 professional scientists, and also was a key member in assembling the team that created the first atomic bomb.

After the war he returned to a setting that didn't include active U.S. combat, and sought to create something that would do equal benefit to mankind as the atomic bomb did destruction. What he envisioned was a mechanical system that would enable humankind to record, catalog, and recall all information and knowledge being created and share it with the masses (or at least the scientific community for openers). This system would try to harness the perpetual explosion of data and intelligence which he saw as a byproduct of the war effort and the dawn of a new information age.

It is here in this article that I believe he is laying down the declaration for what we have only recently achieved with the internet.

He follows to describe the theoretical machine, he calls the memex, in great detail. In his vision the memex would record using a camera and microphone everything a person said, studied, or wrote while sitting at his or her desk structure (pictured above). For each of these input devices he imagines at least two technologies that wouldn't be perfected and commercially available until at least 50 years later. The first is digital photography, which he describes as "...dry photography, in which the picture is finished as soon as it is taken." He states, "It would be a brave man who would predict that such a process will always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty in detail." Another far-off technology that he envisions being useful in his memex is voice transposed to text (he doesn't quite get to voice recognition which would imply intelligent machines which Turing discusses more).

A summary of Bush's vision for the memex input:

"One can picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to recorder. As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that he projects them for examination."

But he hinges all of this on "selection". This is where his major concerns come into play regarding the overwhelming amount of data and knowledge being produced every year (and hopefully captured in his memex). On this he states:

"So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the record. 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 fro the purposes of scientific researchl it inlolves the entire process by which man profits from his required knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed."

Basically what Bush is saying is that the most important thing about data is the ability to mine it effectively. Once again, he brings up a major touchstone of late 20th century IT more than 50 years later. The explosion of information, especially related to commerce, has made its storage and retrieval a huge area of investment for global corporations and institutions. Walmart knows everything you purchased at their store down to the last carrot (or bullet) for targeted advertising or promotion, as well as selling that data to outside vendors (of say cooking or hunting magazines) for more profit than if sold you the magazine out of their own inventory.

On a more benign and beneficial level Google achieves the remarkable feat of being able to retrieve every piece of democratically uploaded (and indexed) web content, in a fraction of a second using only keyword string queries.

Has Bush's vision been realized? In many technological senses yes. Even the principal that the memex has the ability to act on its own is technology being developed and discussed and is billed as "the semantic web" or "web 3.0". I think regardless of what technology avails its self in the near future, it is the founding vision that Vannevar Bush lays out for computer technology that will stand the test of time and offer amazement to its readers.