‘As We May Think’ is an article by Vannevar Bush and addresses the ways in which information can be processed, transmitted and stored by electronic and or mechanical devices. Vannevar mentions how, over time, we have come to entrust machines with more and more responsibility in the realm of tasks that were previously the domain of humans. However, he offers the caveat that, within the limits of present technology, machines are as yet unable to think for themselves. In other words, they can understand a process and perform the necessary operations, be they simple or highly complex, but the process must be defined by a certain level of predictability and uniformity. “Whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove, there is an opportunity for the machine”. One could easily ask a machine “What is the square root of 5684?” and if it is equipped to answer, it will say 75.392. The same cannot be asked of most normal human beings but these same humans might be far better able to explain why piece of music is so fascinating, a task as yet beyond the faculties of even the most advanced computers.

Although I caught the gist of most of what was said in this article, it was for the most part, too technically advanced for a 41 degree day. An interesting notion that I was reminded of is the idea of available surface area being a large determining factor in the processing speed of machines. Nano-computing has promised millions of atom sized processors but ultimately, these will reach the limit of their usefulness. Making machines that speak in a binary fashion, while perhaps the only realistic option for the time being, is still symptomatic of what Mason and Argyris call “single loop learning” or simply, tinkering with the existing structures. The promise of ‘quantum computing’, is a way to potentially change the rules as they are.