I’ve decided to add my thoughts for every section/chapter I read, instead of writing out a traditional paper.

• Dr. Bush makes a very good point that there is too much information out there on any particular field to adequately be articulated by a single person. This is an increasingly problematic situation, especially in the medical field. Doctor’s have to go through too much school to make sure they know everything. Conversely, a doctor in another country, where information is more limited, might only have to go to school for half a decade to open his own practice. While the thoroughness of American doctor’s education may ultimately be for the greater good, it’s only good if people can get to the doctor at all. Unfortunately, there is a drastic shortage of doctors in America, and as healthcare reform takes effect, there is a serious concern of whether or not people will have adequate access to healthcare thanks to the difficulty and time it takes to become a doctor. Yet Dr. Bush brings up another good point: There’s hope on the horizon. At no point in history have we had such advanced machines capable of processing as much information as now. Perhaps, utilizing these machines, we can change the way we dissenimate information, easing the burden professionals have on their road of understanding ever increasing amounts of knowledge.
• Dr. Bush takes an awfully long time to explain that, to make communication more effective among professionals, information must be easily accessible. This happens two ways: compression (including how to make it easily transportable) and allowing it to be easily consulted.
• Explaining that the time of writing down information can be costly, Dr. Bush hopes for machines to come where you could speak and the machines will record what you speak. While he understands that creative writing/record keeping may be beyond the scope of a machine, he believes that machines could help with repetitive calculations. Unfortunately, Dr. Bush’s ideas are still overly laborious, requiring entire roomfuls of girls to operate these machines:

“Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes. There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.”

• Dr. Bush seems to stress that new machines will, and must, continue to develop. Otherwise knowledge of advanced mathematics will be limited to an incredibly small number of people; indeed, according to Dr. Bush, certain issues may be unsolvable without the aid of machines (or at the very least, the use of machines will enhance the time it takes to solve such issues).

” All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the intricate mechanism under the hood. Only then will mathematics be practically effective in bringing the growing knowledge of atomistics to the useful solution of the advanced problems of chemistry, metallurgy, and biology. For this reason there still come more machines to handle advanced mathematics for the scientist.”

• Machines could also be developed to help in logical problems, whether mathematical analysis or practical uses such as organization of reciepts at stores.
• Using the help of machines in organization, it could be possible for a person to use a machine to hold an entire library of information, and using words associated with a particular topic, said person could quickly snap back and forth, find information.
• Here, Bush simply details how such a machine, deemed the “memex” would work, and how it would be used in practicum

Where Bush ultimately ends up is with a description of a readily available “encyclopedia”, which would contain all knowledge, offering assistance to physicians who are treating a peculiar case, or historians who must cope with studying the breadth of human experiences that is history. What’s remarkable about Dr. Bush’s predictions/hopes is how spot on he is. Of course it’s easy to relate Bush’s predictions with the internet and web, but I think it’s important to take it even further and realize how much modern wiki’s resemble Bush’s dream. How often have we been on wikipedia, looking up some nonchalant fact, only to be wisked away on a meandering trail of knowledge, most of it completely irrelevant, yet no less interesting, simply because each article on wikipedia is associated with any number of other articles, all interrelated, yet each totally unique in the subjects covered.  Bush’s dream is so incredible that it wasn’t until he started discussing “world fairs” (of which there hasn’t been one for decades) that I realized he wasn’t a contemporary author.

Still, as my first point stated, sometimes there is too much information, and some sort of simplified communication should be created. I feel as though we still have a ways to go before information becomes so easily accessible that it truly revolutionizes the way we educate, diagnose, study, etc.

Certainly it already has, but the last revolution in communication was also responsible for increasing the amount of knowledge a professional must know by making it easier to access such knowledge. The next revolution should make knowledge so easily accessible, so thoroughly understandable, and so easily appliable that a professional will only be required to know what’s needed at any given moment. Imagine a doctor who never studied the heart until one of his patients has a heart problem. Upon pulling up a professional wiki article, he is able to easily diagnose the problem and treat it effectively, with little worry of error. That’s the future we need to strive for.