F----- o- C----- • Episode 77 • As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
[I've had this episode finished and ready to publish for like 2 months now, ugh! Sorry it's so late. Yeah, this was recorded back in, like, April(?) when we were deep in the "rename the community" discussion. Sigh.]
We're trying to switch it up a bit between "classics" like this month's paper, more recent work (like the prior, and the next episode — already recorded and releasing soon dammit — a preprint , so fresh), and maybe some weirder things. If there's stuff you think we should read that's relatively short (ideally less than 20 pages), well-written, and arguably relevant (the more "arguably" the better I say!) then I'd love to know about it.
No, I'm not going to talk about the content of the episode. Everyone knows it, surely. Surely! Sur… fine.
As We May Think was written in the 1940s and, worried about the surge of information complexity in the modern world, imagines how advancements to present technology would allow for the creation of a special machine, dubbed the "memex", that bears a striking resemblance to the Personal Computer of the 80s and later. This paper is often referenced as a good starting point for folks beginning their journey into deeply understanding and reimagining the computer. It's historically significant, it suggests a bit of alt-history, and (rule of 3s) it does other stuff too!
Imagine my blood pressure rising as Ivan happily trolls his cohosts and me, pretends not to know about logic programming, forward chaining systems, answer set programming, proof systems, etc., only to rug pull his score from 0/10 to 13/10, and then immediately name drop yours truly as the guy in the slack who won't shut up about using logical representations of legal language. 😠😡😮🤨😐🙄😅 Had to play it back for my wife and kids so they knew what all the swearing was about.
I'm less than 20 minutes in and I'm already convinced that Ivan has now firmly entered the "more is more" phase of his artistic development. 😂
You're not wrong! Here's a song I recorded last week. I can't really play cello, clarinet, or French horn, but the gang's all here.
Ivan Reese Now that you have a cymbal that can make a triangle sound, you have the most important part in the finale of the William Tell Overture....
On the name, simplify to "Of Code" ?
I like Feeling of... too. Regardless of what is chosen, just leave a trail!
Also +1 for the idea that LLMs might find their greatest use not in generating more text from text, but in generating structured data from text to help us do the annotation tasks that are hard, but make the unstructured data more useful. I've been preaching that sermon to no effect whatsoever. I'm optimistic that's about to change.
I didn't see a link to the paper in the show notes. Am I correct in thinking that this is the copy you were working off of?
worrydream.com/refs/Bush%20-%20As%20We%20May%20Think%20(Life%20Magazine%209-10-1945).pdf
I interpret the statement that "Even if utterly new recording procedures do not appear, these present ones are certainly in the process of modification and extension" to mean that the device described is a proof of concept in the form of a thought experiment, not a prediction. I believe that the paper is primarily about ways of organizing information, not about the technological implementation. The technological specifics that he provides are just a way of getting the reader to accept that this type of machine is actually possible to build, instead of dismissing it as just a fanciful conjecture.
On the subject of digital versus analog, it is both easier and more economical to make digital machines general purpose because digital values can be stored more easily and the digital calculating unit can be reused for different parts of the problem. So while digital does not necessarily mean general purpose, there is a tendency for them to go together.
On the other hand, analog components are, at an individual level, simpler and cheaper than digital components of the same accuracy, which is good since you need to dedicate one to each part of the calculation. To grossly oversimplify, when you put a formula onto an analog computer, you need an "adder" for each addition in the formula.
This means that even a so-called general purpose analog machine has a relatively limited number of components, and each component can only represent one part of the calculation, so there was still a tendency to specialize in a certain type of problem through the selection of which components are included and how many of each.
Xanadu is much closer to the Memex than the World Wide Web. If you ever do an episode on Xanadu, I recommend working from the book Literary Machines by Ted Nelson. It is the most complete description I have come across so far.
For a fun discussion of the limits of hierarchies, see this old page on Ward's Wiki.
wiki.c2.com/?LimitsOfHierarchies
While the Wikipedia comparison is obvious, it loses the personal dimension of the Memex. In some ways a personal hypertext notebook like TiddlyWiki helps to fill in for other parts of the vision.
a non-linear personal web notebook
Ah yes, forgot to link to the PDF. Thank you! And good thoughts, generally. Appreciate the perspective, and nothing I'd quibble with.
