Two weeks, give or take

While reading Bush's and Nelson's respective works about the future of information technology, I was first struck by the amazingly prescient (particularly in the case of the former) nature of the texts, and second by the extent to which we have integrated ourselves with machines since the time of these writings. Bush seems to be more of a theorist, while Nelson is almost too interested in the technical details that would enable his operating systems (so to speak--although I suppose those are the people who wind up creating the machines in the end), but they're both limited from our perspective by their overreliance on the physical existence of information--Bush wants to use tiny cards or something, and Nelson's ideas suffer from a blocky sort of outdatedness. On page 1 of “A File Structure...” Nelson acknowledges that the interface of a computer functions as a “multifarious, polymorphic, many-dimensional, infinite blackboard,” but on page 93 he notes specifically “it is the man’s job to draw the connections, not the machines,” as a curiously irrelevant aside. He continues “The machine is a repository, not a judge.” Nelson is to some extent (how much I don’t know) a tech guy, so it’s only natural that he sticks with the behind-the-scenes view of computing for the majority of the essay. Indeed, at the time it was written there really wasn’t much else to the science. It seems, however, that if the computer functions in everyday life as a sort of magic blackboard, it hardly matters who has “[drawn] the connections.”

Information has come a long way since it was a series of cards (now it’s tubes), today it has a sort of liquid existence in the minds of those who manipulate it on the internet—which in turn has become a machine that fulfills all the functions Bush and Nelson ascribed to the computers of the future, likely more powerful than they could have imagined. Nelson ends his essay with a bit of restrained philosophical speculation, aware that the computer is in an important way a human model of the divine machine that is the brain, and Bush anticipates direct interface between the brain and machines. I think perhaps information technology is describing an asymptote approaching the impossible limit of the mind—as time goes on, the line between information in our minds and in our computers will become invisible or close to it, and then computers really will extend the true reach of our thought. That would be pretty cool, anyway.