Week 4 - One of Bush's keenest apologies for science and technology is that information is now to be passed on through the life of a race rather than an individual human being. It is the vastness of available information and the task to review it in a manner befitting any legitimate benefit that he proposes as the ultimate challenge. Is the Internet Bush's ideal solution? Or his worst nightmare? All the vast amounts of data Bush describes is readily accessible. But it is precisely because of the Internet that there is now far more than even Bush seemed to have anticipated.

The obstructions Bush addresses are refined to the physical, particularly in his descriptions of the progression of photography, calculating machines, typewriters. And in terms of cost, he didn't correctly anticipate that this would be passed onto the consumer regardless of material production. The market has evolved to assign majority value to the cognitive and less to the physical necessity of access, as there is barely any anymore.

I saw a video interview on cnn the other day with steve wozniak. he had a small black box and pressed a button and a laser - projected, fully functioning keyboard appeared on the desk in front of him. I'd heard they were working on this for screens as well. I think ICT, or at least the access to it, will become more and more removed from the dependence on physical access - something Bush prognosticated as imaging/compression/storage increase in efficiency and decrease in size. With the more availability of information, information itself will become less valuable though.

In terms of long range technology, society gravitates toward uniform formats and diverse technologies. As a rule, we do not like proprietary formats (although Apple and others have proven that wrong on several occasions). And as interactivity becomes even more of a defining measure of ICT in the future, it will be necessary for survival. But it will also become the most challenging. Innovation for next gen technology looks to be pursuing points of divergency.