In 1945 Dr. Vannevar Bush, an American engineer, inventor and scientist, wrote a very stimulating article. His vision of the future developed as the war was over and many resources were becoming newly available to investments otherthan war.
It is interesting to look at this article from todays point of view, referring to some of the ideas introduced to existing products of nowadays.
Bush talks about information “recorded” individually versus communally – How progress is being achieved based on accumulated knowledge as a shared resource. The value of that is not only in having a bigger resource of knowledge since it is impossible to memorize or even to grasp so much knowledge, but in creating the bridge between the different disciplines introduced from different minds. To me the parallel to this would be the world wide web.
As it is not enough to only have the mass records open and accessible, Bush raises the issue of getting to the right information. Record will get lost in the mass and would not be accessible to the people who need to be exposed to it. This could be compared to the search engines of today designed (to its best) on human intuition to give access to specific “record”.
Giving examples of how he sees the future, Bush talks about a walnut size camera, connected to the head, that can produce quality images. A reference to that could be the GoPro camera we all know today!
Bush mentions facsimile machine basing on magnetize paper, that allows very low quality pictures. He offers one that could translate electricity pulses to information and will not be permanent (like a page being “burned” with the image on it). There are many analogies in our time for transferring images through telephone, I will just go with a simple MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) in mobile phones.
Bush talks about the reduction of size, how thousands of pages would be stored in a matchbox, all the worlds knowledge in one truck. This I would compare to an external hard drive, getting smaller and smaller with bigger and bigger capacity.
An author in the future wouldn’t type anymore according to Bush, he would just need to talk to a machine that would type for him… That’s an easy one – voice recognition is today a wide used technology, some browsers are constantly listening and only waiting to hear you say two words to activate a voice control mode.
When Bush talks about a machine able to process inputs from a room full of girls talking contemporaneously, I see just a powerful computer. Not too powerful even.
Bush does speak about some limitations machines would have. For example, the ability to solve equations with a given logic is remarkably higher than the human one, but ARRANGING the data for an equation is an advantage man would always have over machine, Bush sees. Nevertheless in the future we will trust more complicated futuristic machines as we already trust the cash register to handle our important resource – money. Bush then explains how we will use a machine with our personal code to consume and wont even talk to the clerk, just interact with a machine that will do it all. How I see it is a mix of todays credit card and the machine cashiers you see in some big stores.
When Bush talks about the most interesting, yet invented, invention of the future desk, with abilities of holding a lot of records, a way of easily searching (not that easy actually, Bush proposes a system in which the user has to remember a bunch of numbers to make it compatible with the computers reasoning), a projected output (books in the example given) of content and even a few on the same instant! This of course is a personal computer, running a few programs at the same time and fulfilling variable tasks!
A futuristic machine can associate two different objects together, tying them with logic. Enabling the user (lawyer, doctor, chemist) to search through all the similar cases, experiences and knowledge that is related to the relevant field, and furthermore, allowing the user to add his OWN content to the existing one. This is compared to the open source platforms on the web.
Bush talks about a new profession in the future – the “Trail finding” profession would have to do with connecting between machines and human and finding or creating a logic that would bridge in between. Those people today, as I see are programers and programing language creators.
The one futuristic way of interacting with machines that I could not find correlation is a very interesting one. According to Bush, assuming both our brains and machines are basing on varying current, there is no reason why they couldn’t transmit data directly without the means of sight/hear/touch/smell/taste, maybe through electrical vibration as suggested by Bush.