As We May Think
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. (Excerpt & Citation from Wikipedia)
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- 1 point by NishanStepak 21 minutes ago | next | edit | delete [–]
This goes well past libraries and into new concepts. Vannevar Bush wrote an article you might find interesting, As We May Think, it is the precursor in many ways to the internet. https://web.mit.edu/sts.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf
Some people say that this book helped inspire Wikipedia.A book you might also want to read is The World Brain by H.G. Wells which is about a world encyclopedia. https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1303731h.htmlHowever, classification systems are limited. There are currently over 13 zettabytes on the internet right now. This is more than any library can hold. We have entered the zettabyte era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte_Era
I believe it would take something similar to a multi zettabyte vector database attached to a knowledge graph of all the content on the internet and available content in universities and libraries to build a universal taxonomy. Artificial intelligence with human oversite would be used to create a self organizing map based on existing taxonomies like the Universal Decimal Classification or Library of Congress. It would fill in the holes of the existing system. - Names: Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Dan Ingalls, Jef Raskin, Larry Tesler, Brenda Laurel, Bret Victor
Technologies: Erlang, Smalltalk(s), Lisp, Clojure, Query By Example, Programming By Demonstration, Logo
Hardware: Canon Cat, Xerox Alto/Star, Sketchpad, PDP-11, PERQ Workstation, SGI workstations, OLPC
Books: Computers As Theatre Second Edition, Computer Lib, "As We May Think" by Bush, Engelbart's 62' paper, Mindstorms by Seymour Papert.
Links:
https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed...
https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask
https://www.dougengelbart.org/mousesite/EngelbartPapers/Cont...
https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf (for the AGI fuckheads)
- I guess if we all add our favourite papers, we’ll end up with a very long list indeed. My own additions: As we may think by Vannevar Bush, and then something on Project Xanadu. There doesn’t seem to be any foundational paper on the latter, but there is Ted Nelson’s book Literary Machines.
- Read/discussed "As We May Think" in a grad school HCI class - highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of computing.
It is available behind a paywall on The Atlantic website, but you can see the original magazine layout here (which is even cooler IMO) - https://archive.org/details/as-we-may-think
- He was also the one bringing the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memoran... to the attention of the president.
I find him to be incredibly inspiring and "As we may think" even more so. The gravitas is palpable and reading this paper is one of these moments when "standing on the shoulders of giants" feels very much true.
edit: Regarding the memorandum, i found the following quote by Peierls especially chilling:
>Any competent nuclear physicist would have come out with very similar answers to ours if he had been asked: "What is the likely fission cross-section of pure U235? What critical size for separated U235 follows from this? What will be the explosive power of such a mass? How much industrial effort would be needed to do the separation? And would the military value be worthwhile?" The only unusual thing that Frisch and I did at this point was ask those questions.
Its hard to overstate how important it is to not make asking these kind of questions necessary again. I am doubtful about humanities chances for survival otherwise.
- Really?
It's a general personal information datastore directly inspired by As We May Think. I think it's very apt.
While not quite integrated yet, the fact that it runs within the same ecosystem (and machine) as an actual internet search engine makes the vision of Vennevar Bush fairly within reach.
