Excerpt from As We May Think

publish Opened 2026-07-21. From Poetry and literature I like.

Vannevar Bush was an engineer and administrator who led the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II.

In As We May Think , an article published at the twilight of WWII, Bush reflects on science’s dark role during wartime and how it should change as the U.S. transitions to peacetime. He writes with a strong techno-optimist slant, musing about what great technologies humanity might develop through the sharing of scientific progress.

What caught my eye in particular is Bush’s musings on a hypothetical machine called a “memex,” which would act as a computerized extension of one’s memory. Instead of organizing data alphabetically or by date, this memex would organize ideas by association.

Personally, I have a soft spot for this excerpt because Bush is basically describing Obsidian. How incredible it is that today’s free consumer technology was science fiction in 1945!

[The human mind] operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.