title | author |
---|---|
Wikidata/Pandoc Example |
Ed Summers |
In 1945 Vannevar Bush published an article in The Atlantic called As We May Think [@Q610709]. This article gets cited all the time by information studies researchers for its pie in the sky, daydreaming about the Memex machine.
The Memex was designed to emulate the way the brain links data, or at least how Bush thought the brain links data...but with microfilm (which was the new hotness at the time).
Modeling technical contraptions based on how we think the brain works is an obsession that we still see with us today in the work of artificial intelligence researchers using neural networks. The quest for modeling the brain can even be found in the now ubiquitous von Neumann computational architecture [@Q72188848].
Three years earlier, Vannevar Bush started another project, which we now know as the Manhattan Project. This project created and deployed the first Atomic Bomb, killing between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.