As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

[ashutoshm]

As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan. Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts towards destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.

[gwern]

Yes, it's a good essay, but here's the thing - it's no longer the future. We have Bush's ideas implemented. It's a vision of the present filtered through the blinkers of the past (even a genius can only be so prescient). Its interest is now purely historical & dead; it can no longer be any call for action or rethinking.

What's a vision of the future? Sad to say, Douglas Engelbart's 1962 "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html still is far beyond anything we have right now.