As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

From Feeling of Computing by Ivan Reese, Jimmy Miller, and Lu Wilson

July 22, 2025 · 1h 60m

About this episode

The episode discusses Vannevar Bush's predictions from 80 years ago and evaluates their accuracy.

A classic "80-year predictions" episode. How did we do, humanity? Here's the article (free with ads): As We May Think Links $ Patreon We're considering changing The Name of the FoC community, podcast, et cetera. Transatlantic Accent , and all the ships at sea. This episode's advertisements: Ex-Lax , Mifflin , et cetera. The New Media Reader is a good read(er). Blue Prince is surely everyone's 2025 GOTY . You'll find ample discussion of its twisty design in our bonus feed. Oppenheimer was probably my least favourite David Nolen movie. ENIAC was, for a time, the computer. Engelbart The Polaroid instant camera dates back to the 1940s! Google Glass and Ray-Ban Meta , sigh Wikipedia's List of Existing Technologies Predicted in Science Fiction Apparently microfilm and microfiche are both instances of microform . Boy Milk , no explanation needed. Sean M. Carroll , physicist. Claude Shannon , information theorist ;) AI Is Not Your Friend appeared in The Atlantic on May 9th, 2025. Amazon Mechanical Turk is " artificial artificial intelligence". Awesome GitHub lists Daring Fireball and Kottke.org are two long-running blogs that helped popularize the "linkblog" form. The Wirecutter was our…

People in this episode

Hosts: Ivan Reese, Jimmy Miller, Lu Wilson

Topics covered

  • predictions
  • technology
  • history
  • computing
  • advertising

Keywords

  • Vannevar Bush
  • predictions
  • technology
  • computing
  • advertising

Sponsors

Ex-Lax, Mifflin

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Amazon Mechanical Turk, The Wirecutter

Books & works: As We May Think, AI Is Not Your Friend, Oppenheimer, Blue Prince, The New Media Reader

Places: Wikipedia

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