In July of 1945, Vannevar Bush, then Director of the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development, penned an article entitled "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly describing a magical device called the "memex." The memex, Bush explained, would be . . . a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
Sometime in the early 1990s the memex arrived; today, it is commonly called a personal computer that is connected to the Internet.
The specifics of Bush's design seem rather outdated and bizarre, but his vision of putting information at people's fingertips has remained a vital part of the personal computer revolution since its early days. The Internet has cast a new, brighter light on "As We May Think," but for the most part, people have overlooked what is at the core of Bush's article. While the memex resembles a personal computer, the thrust of the article laments modern man's inability to digest the sheer volume of textual information that flows into his daily life.
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and 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.
Put simply, there is too much information to absorb, and our mental facilities and methods of knowledge acquisition are outdated. After all, how much of last week's 250 pages of history reading do you now remember, and how many pages of the proportion you now remember will you be able to recall at this time next year? We spend so much of our lives reading, and in the end, the payoff is rather small. For every fact we learn, three others seem to fall out of our minds. If only we could read as quickly as a computer can scan a page and recall information with the ease with which a microchip can pull information from a hard disk drive. "Dream on," you say?
Is it not possible that we may learn to introduce (information to the mind) without the present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form?
Do you see what he's getting at? Bush goes on to paint a world where our minds are altered to receive information directly in electronic form. In today's world, one could imagine slipping a CD-ROM into the back of his or her skull, but a realized version of this vision is less ridiculous.
Imagine sometime in your lifetime, the introduction of a surgical procedure that will install a small wireless receiver onto some part of your brain. The surgery will be painless, cheap, and leave no visible traces. The newly installed transmitter will basically give your mind instant access to every piece of information ever printed, every song ever sung, every video image ever produced, and every experience your eyes ever observed. Your personal memories and the world's collective cultural, social, and political memory would be instantly retrievable with 100% accuracy.
No doubt many of you are disgusted by the future I describe, but I beg you to bear with me. This device, this computer-enhanced mind, will not alter the way you think or process information; it will simply quicken and broaden your ability to take in information. Imagine being able to read a book simply executing the thought "read 'The Great Gatsby.' " Milliseconds later you have "read" the book and Fitzgerald's language and your ability to interpret it for yourself are exactly as if you had physically read it. It took you a fraction of the time to "read" this book and your memory of it is nearly perfect.
The point I want to stress is that the computer is not doing any thinking for you; it is merely speeding up the acquisition of information by bypassing the eyes and ears and serving as an external source of perfect memory that is instantly accessible. Can you imagine how a device like this would transform society? We would evolve even further into a society of creative thinkers where emphasis would be placed on depth and breadth of analysis and invention; there would no longer be any value placed on rote fact memorization. What ever would Princeton do?
Sound crazy? Sound impossible? Dare to dream. After all, the memex was fiction, just 53 short years ago.
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