"As We May Think" response

In Atlantic Magazine's July 1945 article As We May Think, Vannevar Bush describes a future that comes eerily close to the one we live in. His ideas like the walnut head cam trace into micro and digital photography, the vocoder leads into the concept of hands-free computing, and the memex, well just stick your hand into your pocket and grasp your smart phone (or ipod touch or the laptop in your backpack) and you can see where that was going.

This is all well and good, though I didn't find his predictions to be that astounding since he was basically shrinking the technology of the times and adding a little highly educated speculation. What I did find interesting was how he described the problem (as he saw it) of the day; professional specialization leading to an overflow of information such that the information itself becomes almost useless. I think this is interesting because despite (because of?) having all these amazing advances in technology since 1945 we still sort of have this problem. Not only do we live in a world of connected masses communicating almost instantaneously, but we record almost all of it as well, and then put it all for display in this virtual public Frankenstein we collectively build and call the Internet.

The Internet is lauded as a marvel of the information age, yet one of the biggest faux pas when conducting serious academic research is to cite it in your bibliography. Why? Because the fact that anyone and everyone can publish to it pretty much makes it full of $h!t, and there are SO many people publishing to the Internet it's dizzying. Commercials make jokes of the search engine's ability to return useful information, and companies can purchase space from search providers' return queues instead of relying on true relevance to yield them as a candidate for a search. There are many people who are paid surpluses of money, enough to buy expensive houses and cars and send multiple children to private schools, who's sole job is sifting through all the information detritus out there in the hopes of maintaining some semblance of order and finding little useful nuggets in all the trash. Talk about a 3 legged stool, if the power went out, half the planet wouldn't have a single survival skill honed (the other half are already at each other's throats).

Is all this specialization really that good? Bush states that "Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial" which is true, if you want to turn a human into a machine. How awesome would it be to be able to do one thing faster and more accurately than anything else you can think of is capable of doing it? We make tools for that purpose. The nice thing about being human and being able to see the bigger picture, is you can use many tools. A computer that can calculate billions of operations per second can still only do what WE tell it to. It can't take a break when it wants and cook a meal, take a picture, or theorize on how to better itself... heck it takes insane amounts of computing power and resources just to make a moving image that has any hope of tricking the human eye, and the human eye has been doing this for thousands of years. It seems humans are obsessed with making ourselves more like machines and in doing so, we cheapen and lose sight of what it is to be human.