As We May Think

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As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. Bush argued that as humans turned from war, scientific efforts should shift from increasing physical abilities to making all previous collected human knowledge more accessible.

The article was a reworked and expanded version of his 1939 Mechanization and the Record. The system, which he called memex, was described as based on what was thought, at the time, to be the wave of the future: Ultra high resolution microfilm reels, coupled to multiple screen viewers and cameras, by electromechanical controls. The Atlantic Monthly article was followed, in the September 10, 1945, issue of Life magazine, by a reprint that showed illustrations of the proposed memex desk and automatic typewriter. (Coincidentally, the same issue of Life contained arial photos of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb, a project Bush was instrumental in starting)

As We May Think predicted many kinds of technology invented after its publication, including hypertext, personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

At the same time, the reader today will be surprised how little some technologies have actually advanced since As We May Think appeared in 1945. It is true that, for instance, storage has far surpassed the level imagined by Vannevar Bush, who writes: "The Encyclopedia 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". However, technologies such as speech recognition and associative ways of indexing information are largely underdeveloped and most individuals are interacting with computers in non-natural ways, adapting to technology instead of having technology adapt to users. Automated speech recognition was possible at that time already, but is still rarely used to type texts or operate computers. Indexing of information at the time is described by Bush as being artificial: "When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used". This description resembles popular file systems of modern computer operating systems (FAT, NTFS, ext3 when used without hardlinks and symlinks, etc.), which do not handily allow associative indexing as imagined by Bush.