Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.
The world has arrived at an age of cheap, complex devices of great reliability, and something is bound to come of it.
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.
The cyclops camera and dry photography - a third eye that at once takes a photo and archives the image... "The only fantastic thing about it is the idea of making as many pictures as would result from its use."
So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the record. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowledge.
Quotes from "As We May Think" Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic, July 1945
Solution - the Memex - a dual smart screen desk with switches, levers and "improved" microfilm for recording and storing data... "Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely."
Quotes/Notes from "As We May Think" Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic, July 1945
Demonstration: run a traceroute
Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics in 1948 as "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine." In other words, it is the scientific study of how humans, animals and machines control and communicate with each other.
Studies in cybernetics provide a means for examining the design and function of any system, including social systems such as business management and organizational learning, including for the purpose of making them more efficient and effective.
A symbiotic relationship between humans and machines.
Engineers such as Douglas Engelbart took the article "As We May Think" as a mission statement to develop the technologies envisioned.
"The Mother of All Demos" (1968) was the landmark computer demonstration by Douglas Engelbart at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE) — Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Engelbart domonstrated a computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System (NLS) that included the first mouse, computer windows, hypertext, graphical navigation, video conferencing, collaborative real-time editor...
What would it mean to re-contextualize this call to arms "As We May Think" in the age of surveillance capitalism. Could the title have an alternate meaning when we look at the Google Search Engine as an AI that learns from our searches and then feeds us what it thinks we want? Would it be appropriate to write an essay titled "Google AI: As We May Think"?
Section 230 was not intended to allow a handful of companies to grow into titans controlling vital avenues for our national discourse under the guise of promoting open forums for debate, and then to provide those behemoths blanket immunity when they use their power to censor ...
Donald Trump, Executive Order Preventing Online Censorship
Other countries, including those in the European Union, have stricter rules for online content, leading tech companies to push to export Section 230 via U.S. trade deals.
...any substantive movement is likely months away... Whether or not the FCC acts, ultimately, may be beside the point. The Order created political momentum for Section 230 reform on Capitol Hill and within a variety of political constituencies, and for different reasons. Conservative lawmakers already critical of alleged social media bias applauded the President and called for Section 230 reform. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), for example, sent a letter to Twitter arguing the company should lose its Section 230 immunity and followed up by introducing legislation that would impose significant restrictions on social media platforms' ability to utilize Section 230 protections. Meanwhile, Democratic congressional leaders roundly criticized the President's motivation underlying the Order -but at least some envision Section 230 reform as a tool to address their own concerns regarding the reliability of political information online and platform responsibility to address misinformation. "Beyond the Healines" by Jessica Monahan