Reaction to “As We May Think”
I remember a long time ago. Like a real long time ago. Like a long fifteen year ago. I was an ancient version of myself at the ripe old age of five or six years old. The only things I had to worry about in life was when I had to wake up (More accurately, my parents would come wake me up) and head to school and crack open my “Hooked on Phonics” book for a solid 7 hours every day. Then I would come home, eat my bowl of Spaghettios, decide how much ice cream I would consume that evening, and then happily fall asleep listening to Disney radio. Television was of little to no concern to me. Video games were virtually non-existent to me as well. I would dabble with the occasional Mario game on my Nintendo 64 but really had no dependence on the system or television at all. That is, until things started to get better…
The article, “As We May Think,” written by Vannevar Bush from way back in 1945 had me thinking real hard about my own evolution of taste in technology. This taste has evolved as rapidly as the technology itself and it is eerily unsettling to think of how different things were just a mere fifteen or even just ten years ago. Like I said above, I use to not really care about video games. I could live with or without them and have no complaints. This was the day and age of actually going outside and throw a ball around, make friends in the neighborhood, or just BE outside for a portion of the day. This was before everybody had cell phones. Shoot, this was before MOST people had cell phones. Computers were common but their uses were vastly inferior to what can be done on a computer now. I remember my family really only used our computer to send monthly emails to my grandma who lived a few hours from us to just see how she was doing. And on occasion I would play some basic down-hill skiing game when I was beyond bored. This still made the computer more of a bonus utility that could make a few things easier on people. It was not at all a necessity.
As I got older, this all began to change at an incredibly rapid pace. Computers became a necessity to every house hold. This is largely due to the increase in use and accessibility of the internet. With greater access to the web, people could be connected to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Computers allowed us to do and see just about everything. We could get all the news we wanted with just a couple clicks. Computers were becoming faster and faster. We could knock out a bunch of tasks or interests in shorter and shorter increments of our precious time. We could start even just wasting time online reading pointless articles, playing mindless games, or just seeing what are friends are eating for brunch. It is actually mind-blowing to think of how fast the computer took over as the life-blood of all our information. We have so much access to just about whatever we want, that digital information is quickly and mercilessly replacing physical information. What I mean by that is that we do not rely on newspapers or actual physical pieces of information anymore because we can get all that news and information on the internet. We do not really even need physical books anymore. We have tablets and devices that can store thousands of books to be accessed at any time. This is where the Bush’s article really shocked and impressed me with his level of accuracy.
While reading the article, I had to remind myself that this article was written in 1945. That’s over fifty years before my childhood I was describing as not needing computers. This was incredibly eye-opening to read because he predicted multiple features for computers of the future that we currently have today! One of the first ones that Bush mentions is that “The author need not write — he could talk his thoughts to a machine. Instead of having to type or actual hand write things, a person could simply say what he/she wanted to write and the machine would write it for them. Today we have that for our phones and for our computers. Although actually typing is still the dominant way to write today, we do have the ability to speak and have our machines turn that into written word. Our phones are probably what we use this for most often. It allows us to text and drive much more efficiently. We also have the wonderfully un-wonderful artificial intelligence that is Siri. We can search for anything and everything just by talking to our phones and it will bring up a whole slew of results we could comb through for days on end.
The biggest and most important, as well as accurate prediction that Bush made was how machines would one day store information. This was comparable to a sort of digital filing cabinet. Bush says “How to consult the record — machines examine the files and select related items.” This ability has been surpassed in today’s computers but he was extremely accurate nonetheless. Not only are our computers able to find information (files or documents) for us, but so can our internet. We have entire search engines on the web that are dedicated to searching and finding whatever we search for and gives us countless additional results that re related to our original inquiry. He predicted that machines would be able to store multiple files, and, by use of selecting tool, we could search for what we wanted and the machine would retrieve and display it for us on a glass screen in front of us. This is basically the definition of a modern computer. It stores all our information and files on a hard drive and we can select any one of these files at any time and have all of its properties displayed for us in a matter of milliseconds.
One of the other cool things mentioned in the article was that machines could store books. We would then use our machine to select whatever book we would like to read, and it would display the text on the screen. We could then use the selecting device to turn the pages back and forth. This is almost exactly a Kindle for us today. Only real difference is that Kindles are handheld and touch screen, and don’t require a selecting device as Bush described. However, this is still amazing to read and see how close he came to guessing everything this accurately. After reading this article I was overcome with a sense of wonder for what our future holds. If technology has come this far in the past fifty years, I cannot wait to see what we come up with during this age where technological advancement is at the forefront of our priorities and is changing at lightning speed.
