Gelernter, in his work, The Second Coming: A Manifesto, outlines 58 theses about the features of the new wave of technology. Two of these were especially resonant with Bush’s essay, As We May Think
36. File cabinets and human minds are information-storage systems. We could model computerized information-storage on the mind instead of the file cabinet if we wanted to.
37. Elements stored in a mind do not have names and are not organized into folders; are retrieved not by name or folder but by contents. (Hear a voice, think of a face: you’ve retrieved a memory that contains the voice as one component.) You can see everything in your memory from the standpoint of past, present and future. Using a file cabinet, you classify information when you put it in; minds classify information when it is taken out. (Yesterday afternoon at four you stood with Natasha on Fifth Avenue in the rain — as you might recall when you are thinking about “Fifth Avenue,” “rain,” “Natasha” or many other things. But you attached no such labels to the memory when you acquired it. The classification happened retrospectively.)
I feel that the two theses are intertwined and that they serve to clarify and define each other. In 36, Gelernter outlines that the computer needs to be organized in the same way as we think. In 37, he clarifies how we think, and how a computer could mimic that same organization format. Bush, though writing in an earlier era, mimics many of the same ideas as these two theses present.
Bush originally wrote his essay as an address to scientists post-World War II about new applications of science and technology to better the world rather than build weapons. He says, “Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now totally inadequate for their purpose” (37). He says that information is lost because people who can understand it are unable to access it. For example, Mendel’s concept of genetics was not widely published, and hence those who could understand and apply that theory never had access to it (37). “Truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential” (37) Bush says. These ideas are also present in Gelernter’s theses. If we cannot understand computers because they are organized improperly, not in the way we think, then consequently the information is lost to us. It is never able to reach our minds in a way that we can understand. In essence, the material never gets published. But Bush connects with Gelernter overtly when he says, “A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored and above all it must be consulted” (38). If one were to replace the word ‘record’ with ‘file’ it becomes clear how synchronized the two writings are. Both Bush and Gelernter seek to augment the mind by creating a computer that works as the mind does. Bush continues,
When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can only be found in one place…[t]he human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts. (44)
The ideas of these two authors are so patently similar. Both seek to recreate the way we approach technology, by creating technology that thinks as we do. Too much of modern day technology is organized like a library. There is such a great emphasis on taxonomy, as if that it the way the human mind actually works. We would like to think that there are simple, labeled and identified files within our brain that we can pull up at will, but in reality the mind is not organized that way, and our attempts to classify items in that manner is not conducive to the way we think. Taxonomies are fine for classifying the animal kingdom, but it is not a practical example of the way the human mind works. Science is still stuck in the Enlightenment era’s obsession with logic and organization. The era’s obsession with the physical world led the idea that taxonomy was the best way to organize and sort material.
However, the reason that Romanticism appeared in the first place is because after a while, logical reasoning grates on the human mind and suppresses creativity. Logical reasoning is counterintuitive because it does not follow the model of the human mind. It attempts to classify and file items, but the human mind is like a spider web, with various threads connecting to different areas and to each other. (Ironically, it was Diderot, an Enlightenment philosopher, and creator of the Encyclopedia, who outlined the idea of the human mind as a spider web in his work D’Alembert’s Dream.) To attempt to create computers that follow such an outdated system as a taxonomy is to create, in essence, a computer that is already outdated before it is even finished. The new wave of technology is the next Romanticism, an era where computers are not based on logic, but emotion. Where pulling up a file is not a matter of naming, classification and taxonomy, but a symbiosis of past present and future memories and associations. The way we actually think.
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