As We May Think by Vannevar Bush: A Response by Riola Musoke-Lubega

“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

At first I thought Bush was talking about a theoretical war, but he quite literally was referencing world war 2. I think that's telling that one of the early musings of what we now know as modern technology came from a scientist who contributed to the development of nuclear weapons (the Manhattan Project). It's always surprising to read older documents predicting the world we currently live in but this coming from the guy who helped create nuclear weapons is kind of like… no sh*t.1 If you’re envisioning ways to kill a lot of people it’s not that crazy you can also think “hmm maybe we’ll have tiny cameras on our foreheads one day”. I feel like the Puritans were onto something when they said, “What hath God wrought?”, because to seriously think about what has been created in the name of technological advancement and national power is terrifying.
Something about this essay reminds me of Manifest Destiny, the idea that early settlers were destined by God to "spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent."
The article keeps on using the phrase, “the application of science to warfare”, which is a fancy way to talk about developing tools that directly or indirectly result in people’s death. ¹ please excuse my language, i tried to substitute the word but nothing packed the punch

"Of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence?"
“released him partly from the bondage of bare existence”

(I like this quote because it's so dramatic)

“The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”

My immediate thought is: yeah, something bad! But I don’t think Vannevar Bush is particularly thinking about good and bad, at least in a moral sense.