Vannevar Bush: Summarizing His Future

The summation of human experience is being

expanded

at a prodigious rate,

and yet 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.

For a

record of knowledge

that evolves and endures

throughout the life of human race

,
to be useful to science,

it must be

continuously extended

,
it must be

stored

,
and above all it must be

consulted

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the

artificiality

of systems of indexing;
selection by association, rather than indexing, is yet to be mechanized.

Consider:

a future device for individual use,

which is a sort of mechanized private file and library.

—thus science may implement the ways in which man

produces

stores

, and

consults

the record of the race.

To be honest, it took me a while to understand Bush’s point when I first read through it. There was also a lot of photography jargon that I was unfamiliar with, and it just seemed like he was listing new technologies (for his time). However, reading his idea of the “memex” tied it all together for me, and I thought it was interesting to compare that to the internet and computers and cell phones of today. I had never really thought about how people thought up inventing all of that—in my mind, it was a natural, inevitable occurrence in human history—but here was someone, without our modern technologies, detailing his thought process through a future invention. While not in his original context, his question, “What are the scientists to do next?” I feel it is still apt—sometimes I wonder what I could possibly create, as it seems like everything has already been done before. His whole essay is an answer and a challenge to that question: essentially, that there is always more.

Vannevar Bush:Summarizing His Future

. . .

Consider:

Vannevar Bush:
Summarizing His Future