Perhaps I’m not the most attentive reader, but I didn’t even catch that As We May Think was written in 1945 until I paused while reading & glanced at the blog entries. Wow… Vannevar Bush’s visions are very impressive. This essay describes many devices that we use today.
I used to think that if we dropped someone from the past into our world, they would have a heart attack from simply looking at our world today. This article made me realize that people from the past have been imagining the world we live in before our parents were born. So what makes people so imaginative? Why are people like Vannevar Bush thinking about & describing the future? A lot of if comes from our desire to make our world easier to live in: we’re problem solvers. Bush noted early in As We May Think that the inventions of the past have focused on improving the physical condition of man. Once we've satisfied our basic physical needs, we can work on tools that will improve our intellectual condition.
Why is this article relevant? I think the take-away message is to note the value of an idea. All of our ideas may not be executable in our lifetimes, but our ideas may serve as the blueprint for some device for our children and grandchildren.
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