Many years ago, long before the Internet or artificial intelligence, an American engineer named Vannevar Bush tried to resolve an issue. He could see how difficult it was for experts to explore every little thing and saw the potential for a greater way.
This was within the Nineteen Forties when someone who was on the lookout for articles, books or other scientific records needed to go to a library and seek for an index. This meant drawers for drawers which can be full of index cards that were normally sorted by creator, title or subject.
When they found what they were on the lookout for, creating copies or extracts was a tedious, manual task. They must be very organized to maintain their very own records. And hurt everyone who worked over a couple of discipline. Since each book could only be physically in a single place, all of them needed to be submitted exclusively under a primary topic. An article about cave art couldn’t be each in art and archeology, and researchers often wasted additional time to search out the proper place.
This was at all times a challenge, but an explosion in research publications during this time had much worse than before. As Bush wrote in an influential essay, How we likewithin the Atlantic in July 1945:
There is a growing research mountain. However, there’s increased indications that we’re stuck today in the middle of specialization. The investigator is staggered by the outcomes and conclusions of 1000’s of other employees – conclusions that he can not find time to recollect how they seem.
Bush was Dean of the School of Engineering on MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and President of the Carnegie Institute. During the Second World War, he was director of the Office for Scientific Research and Development and coordinated the activities of around 6,000 scientists who were relentlessly working to provide their country a technological advantage. He could see that science was drastically slowed down by the research process and proposed an answer that he described as “Memex”.
The Memex must be a private device that was built right into a desk that required little physical space. It would rely heavily on microfilm for data storage, a brand new technology at the moment. The Memex would use this to save lots of a lot of documents in a highly compressed format that may very well be projected onto translucent screens.
The most significant thing is that Bushs Memex should include a type of associative indexing for tying up two elements. The user could use a keyboard to click on a code number along with a document to leap into an associated document or show them at the identical time – without having to look an index.
Bush admitted in his essay that the sort of keyboard click was not technologically feasible. Nevertheless, he believed that it might be soon and pointed to existing systems for handling data akin to Cards beaten as a possible forerunner.
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He imagined that a user would make the connections between elements while developing his personal research library and created chains of microfilm frames, through which the identical document or extract may very well be a part of several trails at the identical time.
New additions might be inserted either by photography on microfilm or by buying a microfilm of an existing document. In fact, a user could expand his Memex with enormous reference texts. “New types of encyclopedia will appear,” said Bush, “ready with a network of associatives that run through them and are able to drop within the Memex”. This is just not removed from today's Wikipedia.
Where it led
Bush thought that the Memex would help researchers to think more naturally and more associative, which can be reflected of their records. He is claimed to have inspired the American inventors Ted Nelson And Douglas EngelbartThe hypertext systems developed independently of each other within the Sixties, through which documents contained hyperlinks that were capable of access other documents directly. These became the muse of the World Wide Web as we understand it.
In addition to the sensible features of easy access to a lot information, Bush believed that the added value within the Memex made it easier for users to control ideas and trigger latest ones. His essay distinguished between repeating and inventive pondering and foresight that there would soon be latest “powerful mechanical AIDS” to support the repeated variety.
He might consider mostly about mathematics, but he left the door open to other pondering processes. And 80 years later, with AI in our pockets, we automate loads greater than could ever ever be possible with a calculator.
If this seems like a joyful ending, Bush doesn’t sound overly optimistic when he visited his own vision in his 1970 book again Parts of the motion. In the past 25 years he had witnessed technological progress in areas akin to computing which have been brought closer to the Memex to reality.
But Bush had the sensation that the technology had largely missed the philosophical intention of his vision to enhance human pondering and creativity:
(1945-dream pond machine dyeing thinking-so-no-counter
Bush would die only 4 years later on the age of 84, but these concerns still feel remarkably relevant today. Although it’s great that we should not have to look for a book by leafing through tab cards in chests of drawers, we may feel restless when machines do the most important a part of pondering for us.
Jackpress
Does this technology improve and sharpen our skills or does it make us lazy? Everyone is undoubtedly different, but the danger is that we lose all the abilities that we leave the machines and that younger generations may not even get the chance to learn them in any respect.
As we might imagine, the lesson is that a purely technical solution just like the Memex is just not sufficient. The technology must still be centered by human and underpinned by a philosophical vision. If we expect an awesome automation in human pondering in the approaching years, the challenge is to in some way protect our creativity and argumentation at the identical time.
