Monday, February 6, 2012

As We May Think: A Map To Our Present (except for cyborgs)

This was a very engaging read, especially for the "wow" factor of how many future technologies were imagined and nailed in the span of a few pages. Bush seems to have pretty much mapped out computing for the next hundred years to come. This makes one wonder, however, if he was indeed that prescient, or if "innovators," either consciously or not, have been mining this article for decades, bringing his vision to bear.

A few passages/concepts really stood out to me:

  • "...if the users are to free their brains for something more than repetitive detailed transformations in accordance with established rules." This gels the idea that both Justin and Greg mentioned at lunch last week; that our brains, adapting to the tools we now use regularly today, will begin to prune and repurpose themselves to a completely different mode of thinking and being.
  • On a similar note, he remarks that "inventors of universal languages have not seized upon the idea of producing one which better fitted the technique for transmitting and recording speech." Again, we see the tension of making the tools adapt to our humanity as opposed to our humanity adapting to a more tool-friendly way of operating.
  • Finally, when Bush talks about trails, he is trying to solve the problem of storing an item in a single place. These associations are not many to one, but many to many, such that the item can be "stored" in and accessed from one of many trails. To me, this sounds an awful lot like tagging. As it turns out, I'm not the first person to come to that conclusion. :)