As I began reading Vannevar Bush’s article As We May Think, I felt something was very off. I didn’t notice anything strange about the writing, or even necessarily the content, but something was different. I realized the strange feeling I was noticing was the fact that this article was written in 1945, and yet the issues discussed are still relevant today! With the huge number of academics out there and every one of them making huge predictions about the future, monkey-typewriter theory confirms that at least one of them is going to be right sometime, but Bush’s prediction seems almost too uncanny. To have come up with his ideas in the time when Alan Turing was just creating the first rudimentary computers is astonishing.
Vannevar Bush predicted the internet with a quaint 1940s twist in the form of the Memex. While he imagined the memex to be essentially a miniature library where you can only access content you own, I imagine he would be blown away by our ability to access huge quantities of high quality data for free. He imagines that the memex would be largely for scientific and academic purposes, and I’d say that there’s a strong parallel to be drawn between the memex and Wikipedia, both of which contain vast amounts of knowledge which are compressed down to fit into your pocket (All of Wikipedia only takes up 9GB). His prediction included the necessity of sharing files easily with friends, and the idea of a file path for easily organizing and retrieving data.
