As We May Think

This article was very long winded, but very interesting. I understand why he had to go into such depth as the image he was trying to conjure up was of something not yet invented, leaving him only to the use of examples. I like how he was talking about the progressiveness of technology in many fields and how the recording and storage of information had not been well thought out yet, but was inevitable. He spoke about how with more technologies, and better means of recording them, we were making the increase in technologies quite steeper and would continue to do so with new developments. His ideals were that we no longer would have to spend half our lives scouring the libraries to catch up with modern technology, but we would be able to easily access this information on a global scale and work off of it. He also spoke about the inevitability of micro... everything. In short spans of recent years we were able to shrink the size of many machines while retaining or even increasing the quality of work the produce. I also enjoyed him talking about integrating our speech into recording data. I had no idea the Vocoders and Voders were around at those times. He argued the efficiency of these, along with radios and cameras to record observations and in turn help collect data to further scientific progress. His thinking was just far beyond his time and I think he had a lot to do with the way things are headed technologically.

(Charles Cole)