As We May Think

This article was a very interesting look into what one person thought technology would advance into. It was especially interesting because it was from decades before today. Bush begins his article by talking about technology and science and their relationship with times of destruction. He then asks the great question of what will scientists be worth in times of peace? What will they do and how will they advance technology? This brings Bush into the heart of his article. The meat of it.

He goes on to answer this question. He first talks about all the great things that technology has done for man. Peaceful advancements at that. "They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter..." However, for Bush, that is not enough. Not by a long shot. He goes into extreme detail about future inventions and advancements in science that mirror inventions made only years ago and even some made today. For instance, Bush talks a lot about film, both static and full of motion. One part that stuck out were his ideas on immediate photography. He talks about dry photography and films with "diazo dyes which form a picture without development..." He ends this area of his talk with the phrase "...it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately."

I don't believe one would be able to read that sentence and not think of digital cameras. They give the user the option of viewing the picture they have just taken seconds after. Seconds. I don't even think that Bush was thinking of that when he wrote this. It is amazing to see this parallel. Though perhaps he wasn't talking about this immediate photography in a digital sense, his ideas still point to this modern day invention.

He goes further into it by talking about compression in regards to text. He talks about taking the Encyclopedia Britannica being put onto micro film and being able to compress many different volumes of text down to a very small size. Though it may not be what he was leading into to, this made me think of text compression when it comes to computers. They are able to store massive amounts of text. So, in other words, the storage aspect stuck out to me in this part of his writing.
This also made me think about the development of e-books and e-readers. Both inventions of modern times. It is amazing to see Bush's accuracy in regards to these advancements.

Though the idea of e-books may not have been what he was going for with his ideas of compression, his does make mention of something in the sense of e-readers and the like further along in his writing. He talks about the user being able to call up any book just by inputting a special code in this device. This idea, just like the digital photography reference, is like a mirror of the technology made today.

I wonder what Bush would say now. Given all of the technological advancements made today, what would he think? With a lot of his predictions living in some way today, I wonder what his thoughts for today's future would be. He probably push even further along for more change. More advancements. In Bush's eyes, it seems that technology should never stand still.