Bush could be considered a visionary for his time; a prophet of the advancements and powers of future technology.  His ability to analyze and predict the developments that science and technology would undertake as knowledge continued to abound was accurate to say the least, but in retrospect, I see his attitudes toward these leaps as prideful and naively optimistic.  Throughout this work, Bush lists technologies current to his time, and then goes into explicit detail on how in a few short years they will be completely redefined and advanced.  While his faith in science is admirable, he is blinded by it and in the end believes in it to a fault.

Bush’s timeline is what struck me the most as a gross misrepresentation of what has actually occurred between now and when his article was written.  Bush believed that many of his mentioned advancements would happen relatively soon after the war had ended.  Of his predicted advancements, only about half have been made (in similarity to his prediction), and of those, even fewer have been advanced as far has he said they would.  Even more so, many of the leaps he talks about have only occurred within the last 20 years, which is being generous; nowhere near the end of WWII.  Bush’s Memex idea for example, while possibly could be seen as an early iteration of a computer, is much more complex than any household computer that you or I might be using to read this.  With it’s almost sentient-like memory and computing power, the Memex is something scientists might be striving to make in our current time, and could never have been possible to create in the late 1900s.  Take Bush’s comments on prosthetics and handicap improvements,

The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?

By bone conduction we already introduce sounds: into the nerve channels of the deaf in order that they may hear. Is it not possible that we may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form? With a couple of electrodes on the skull the encephalograph now produces pen-and-ink traces which bear some relation to the electrical phenomena going on in the brain itself. True, the record is unintelligible, except as it points out certain gross misfunctioning of the cerebral mechanism; but who would now place bounds on where such a thing may lead?

While at the time he might have been thinking these advancements were right around the corner, today these ideas seem even farther away than they did back when Bush wrote them.  The field of prosthetics has developed greatly over the years, but to have a man-made arm that reacts to your eyes and ears and is bound to your nerves is beyond anything currently on the market.  And bone conduction to make the deaf hear?  Even if scientists are developing technology on par with that, the availability is so small, and the price so high that it will take years before anything of quality will be made available to the public.

Bush’s pride in the science of his time caused him to get carried away with his predictions and hope for the future.  Yes, we have come a long way since 1945, almost exponentially so in the last 20 years, but the wishful thinking he shows in this article leads me to believe he overlooked the true nature of the advancements and put faith in developments that were too new and unlearned to be sure of.  A great visionary he might have been, but also a jaded one.