Vannevar Bush

the veterans hospital suffering from psychiatric disorders some of them getting lobotomies huge need for trained professional manpower and this is a period where america transforms itself the war has meant mass mobilization the breakdown of the constraints on the federal government the advent of massive intervention into the economy and into everything else, the birth of the modern research university.

Vannevar Bush, who's the science advisor, writes a very famous book on the need for big science, the need for the government to invest in science.

Science has contributed to winning the war, most obviously in the atom bomb.

But in radar in all kinds of ways.

More on exactly how they got there later.

But every name on their list traces back to the same wartime science network run by one man, Vannevar Bush, which means whoever was making these calls wasn't improvising, and they probably came from the deepest part of America's nuclear program.

So I mean 100 feet.

Have you guys measured out how big 100 feet would've been? Like, what's the si- I'm bad with, like, scale.

Health problems can be solved.

He's going down this wish list that any scientist would love to be able to say, and he says, "We have this technology now."

And he worked closely with Vannevar Bush.

He-

this"?Yeah, I mean, I think that really goes back to the whole World War II experience, right, where technology basically helped won- win the war.

And the Vannevar Bush, who wrote Science, The Endless Frontier, one of my favorite, you know, found- founding documents of fundamental science policy, saying that fundamental science, exploratory science, uncertain outcome science, not applied science, uh, is actually critical to the long-term health and survival of a nation, security of a nation, not just for public health, but also for, you know, they just come out of, you know, if the Nazis had gotten the atom bomb, World War II would've gone very differently, right? Inventions of radar, uh, other fundamental technologies, even things like penicillin in terms of treating troops.

All of these types of fundamental investments fundamentally changed the US relationship and, and this idea of this kind of growing and active federal government.

Uh, he wrote this report to Roosevelt.

I don't say this, it's just some irrational thing that just popped up.

A lot of the United States' prowess post-World War II came directly from innovations around Silicon Valley, from Vannevar Bush on.

And I think that's important, right? Like it's important to acknowledge that that's a real thing.

The world's most, you know, some of the world's most our biggest and best companies came from that area.

So on a wartime supply chain where every pound of cargo space is contested, that's the difference between, you know, you getting mail and no mail.

And in 1945, Vannevar Bush writes the often quoted article, As We May Think in the Atlantic that July.

The memex is in there and the people remember it as a prophecy of the internet.

What it actually is mechanically is a desk full of microfilm with a screen on top and a way of linking one frame to another.

You know, after it was created by the National Security Act of 1947.

But you had Vannevar Bush was on it.

Hoyt Vandenberg, that they've named Vandenberg Air Force Base after, was on it.

James Forrestal was on it, was the Secretary of Defense.

And then we can expand that out.

We were talking about earlier, and I was talking to my students about this classic human-computer interaction paper, as we may think, by Vannevar Bush from 1945, his memex, this portmanteau of memory expansion, sort of the precursor to, it literally looks like a desktop being a precursor to the internet and so on and so forth, this idea that we're expanding human cognition.

So there's this kind of through line, and I think being a practitioner in the UX world as generative AI was coming online, it started to feel like we kind of lost the plot in some ways, or there's certainly a big risk of losing the plot.

And I talk about that in the book and particularly get into the deeper philosophy behind that in the final chapter.