To me the most interesting part of Vannevar Bush’s piece is the optimism about the progress of technology and society that practically seeps through the pages. He writes not just about the great need for easy access for information, but also about how it would benefit society. We would learn from our mistakes and be better people because of it. Now we have access to an almost unlimited amount of information, in a form that Bush could only have imagined, but it seems to me that human society hasn’t changed. The technology has certainly made our lives easier, but it hasn’t changed our human nature.
This is a somewhat deep topic to be writing about in a blog post, and I invite anyone who disagrees to please write me a comment, but it seems like this could be an important point to make. Bush is not the first person I have read who has this optimistic view, and I’m sure he will not be the last. But I doubt that the state technological innovations supports his viewpoint.

He believes that technological advances will not just make life more convenient for us, but also prevent us from making the mistakes of the past. On the subject of easy access to an almost unlimited amount of information, he writes that “Presumably mans’ spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.”
The internet and other technology allow us to get more done in a day than ever before, communicate with loved ones from thousands of miles away, and probably write a scholarly paper in a fraction of the time it used to take. But I doubt it has prevented us from making the same bad mistakes others have made before.
Instead, the internet has created many new problems for us. Many people use the internet for scams and other less spiritually elevating pursuits. In the papers one reads about people who were duped out of hundereds of thousands of dollars by others from as far away as Nigeria. Apparently the KKK is undergoing a resurgence due to the ease its members can communicate with each other over the internet. Terrorist cells can communicate with each other and coordinate their activities more easily. And anyone can learn how to build a bomb over the web. The internet, with the progress it has given us, has opened up new ways to harm someone. The same ease it gives to a scholar trying to find an obscure paper it also lends to someone trying to steal an identity. There is a wider range of what we are now capable of, but we are probably no happier and more stressed now.
Was Bush naive to think that progress in technology would also bring some kind of progress in the human condition? He mentions that science has enabled humanity to “throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons.” In his time, technology certainly enabled the atomic bomb, and countless other improvements created the weapons used to bomb London or Tokyo. But Bush writes science, in the form of access to information, may “yet allow him [humanity] truly to encompass the great record and grow in the wisdom of race experience.” Humankind can then “wield that record for his true good.” Through technology we now have the ability access almost any record there is. But has that improved us on the whole? Bush concludes his piece with the idea that we are in a “process” and we must not “lose hope as to the outcome.” However, I personally think that technology can substantially improve our abilities, but I question whether this process can improve anyone’s character, let alone the character of all of humanity.