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It references the story of Charles Babbage's computing machine, and how it was ahead of if its time, and uses a quick mental experiment to be very convincing. Certain ideas you just can't realize until you have the supporting technologies.

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Somewhat related, I recently read how bicycle couldn't have been invented more than 100 years ago, as it depended on many technologies which just became good enough then (ball bearings, rubber quality, metalworking precision, etc)

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Back to Vannevar Bush, he was the head of research for USA during WW2, and one of the smartest and most educated people of his time, but even he couldn't imagine that we can have a higher bandwidth of input than "a roomful of girls"

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That's not to say he was dumb! If one of the smartest and most connected and educated person then could have such blindspots, imagine how ridiculous and pathetic our blindspots today would seem to kids in the future.

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Back to Vannevar Bush, he was the head of research for USA during WW2, and one of the smartest and most educated people of his time, but even he couldn't imagine that we can have a higher bandwidth of input than "a roomful of girls"

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Another blindspot is about search algorithms - today such search is mostly solved. But what makes it harder is the competition for attention, which distorts what is visible and findable.

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The crux of the paper is the "memex". The idea of the memex is to organize information by association to make it easier to follow the mind's structure.

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Still, he was thinking within the limitations of his time. The memex was supposed to be desk.

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What would he imagine if he knew about the internet, machine learning, crypto currencies, crispr, computational biology, alpha zero. It's our turn to imagine it.

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Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

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