A Machine that Thinks

Modern machines can already see, hear, smell and calculate--and one day they may begin to think. Dr. Vannevar Bush, head of Office of Scientific Research and Development, believes that a "thinking" machine (of limited intellectual capabilities) can be built. In the July Atlantic Monthly, he predicts a brain robot that will relieve man of much of the routine spadework of thinking. The machine he envisages is an electronic and photographic contraption which would store facts for ready recall, sort a man's ideas, even organize them logically.

Dr. Bush, the inventor of a better-than-human calculator, M.I.T.'s famed differential analyzer, was impressed by the ingenious mechanical brains (directing gunfire, for example) developed during the war. Dr. Bush has decided that scientists should now devote themselves to organizing the vast amount of uncollated information about the world. There is no mechanical substitute, he concedes, for mature thought. But he suggests that a lot can still be done with microfilm and the electronic tube.

Microfilm (using much greater reductions than are now common) could reduce the Encyclopaedia Britannica to the size of a matchbox, might even store the whole printed record of the human race in one moving van. All the information that the most learned scholar needs could be filed in one end of a desk.

Dr. Bush's "thinking" machine, which he calls "memex," would be a desk with a microfilm library inside and several translucent screens on top. In the library would be filed books, newspapers, notes, memoranda, photographs, etc. To refer to any item, a user would tap its code number on a keyboard--like dialing a phone number --and it would be projected on one of the screens. He could read page by page or skim. By means of dry photography (like facsimile), he could write marginal notes on the screen and have them reproduced on the microfilm.

Give Me a Train of Thought. The chief trouble with libraries, says Bush, is that information has to be tracked down through an intricate indexing system. "Having found one item . . . one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association." The machine would mechanize this process by permanently tying together two or more items with code numbers. Thereafter, the same train of thought could be projected on a screen at will by tapping off the right code (recorded in a code book).

Further, "by the clever use of relay circuits," Dr. Bush thinks ideas can be arranged automatically in logical order: "Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law."

Other Bush notions about mechanical aids to thought: a recording machine that would type when talked to, with a radio connection making it possible for the busy executive to record an idea for the microfilm library when he is away from his office; a camera the size of a walnut (worn on the forehead) which would take stereoscopic pictures in full color.

Dr. Bush considers all these suggestions "commonplace," attainable by combining devices already in use or in development. Says he: "The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it."

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