Notes: As We May Think

As We May Think
By Vannevar Bush, July, 1945

The following notes may sometimes be very immature. They are just some intuitions thoughts emerged in my brain when I was reading the article.

This paper was generally very impressive to me because many predictions it made have already become our lives and many of his ideas are still very inspirative even at modern times. For example, the “memex” becomes today’s cell phones and many things he described but not named for become today’s hypertext, the supercomputer, digital cameras, the Internet, speech recognition, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia. I can’t deny that Bush is really an impressive visionary. But his ideas have their limits, too.

For example, the walnut camera may not have a technical problem, but in terms of human privacy, this kind of little thing would become a serious problem. These days, people become more and more delicate about privacy. Secretly taking photos are not permitted in law actually. What your camera has captured is not “your data” for it may include other people or things that do not belong to you at all. Another example, “It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine. It will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future.” Actually, it’s not. The truth is the time gap between each technique revolution becomes shorter and shorter, which is enormously astonishing sometimes. There are some other statements proved to be wrong or unrealistic, but I’m not gonna talk about them in details.I’m gonna elaborate what this article inspired me.

Firstly, extending the man’s mental power is extremely important these days as has been pointed out clearly in the paper. Getting enough control of the material world is indeed very necessary because it concerns about our existence. But when it comes to modern times, things have changed. Starting a worldwide war is no longer an easy thing for any countries or persons because of the existence of the nuclear weapon. Having a worldwide plague is no longer a common situation because of the improvement of modern medicine and the awareness of isolation in advance. Being destroyed by a nature catastrophe also becomes a rare situation because of the forecast by high techniques. Of course, all of the statements above are based on general situations in the world. Many people are still starving, homeless and suffering illness. In this case, the pursuit of mental happiness becomes more and more urgent. So we need to make full use of our techniques to make people feel happy about their lives. This leads to an important conclusion — human beings are the center of every design or techniques and mental happiness and physical comforts is very important. So we need to focus on human beings, this is the main point.

Secondly, storing data and making an efficient consultation really matters in the times of big data. Nowadays, the amount of our stored data is enormous, but what is really used is not that much. There are tons of researches and experiment results, but what is known by the public is just a corner of an iceberg. So if we want to be smarter and more sensitive to the changes in our lives, we need to change the way we get information. Machine learning may be an approach, OpenAI’s beaten human’s best Dota player and AlphaGO’s beaten human’s best GO player may tell us something - in the past we used to learn from each other, basically human beings, but nowadays maybe we can learn from the machines. Sometimes they come up with some seemingly ridiculous conclusions but turn out to be right. The machine times are coming, and we must embrace the changes. But everything has its merits and its perils. Today’s machine learning can just beat human in some fields require lots of calculation, mostly real time. But when it comes to translation and picture recognition, it will have a long way to go.

Thirdly, automation is the trend. We should have done whatever we can to make things simple and nice, so automation is the best choice. In the example of “Department store”, Bush narrated a bunch of procedure in the selling process and then mentioned: “A central records device has been developed in which much of this work is done conveniently.” This is actually happening in our real lives. Not only the stores and market but also many large enterprises. SAP is a company producing this kind of software to help people organize the data in companies and it’s getting stronger. So when it comes to HCI, we need to pay more attention to what human beings need to do and try our best to make it nice and simple.

Generally speaking, this article has made me think a lot. I think it remains to be an inspiring article even in modern times.