PERSON
Vannevar Bush
The engineer who drew the clearest line between augmentation and automation—architect of the postwar federal research compact, designer of the memex, and the first thinker to insist that the machine's proper role is to extend the reach of the mature human mind rather than to replace it.
Vannevar Bush wrote 'As We May Think' in 1945 to solve a human problem, not a technological one. The growing mountain of scientific research was not a metaphor; it was a measurement of the gap between the rate at which human knowledge was accumulating and the rate at which any individual could navigate it. The instrument Bush proposed—the
memex, a desk that would store, retrieve, and above all link documents along personally constructed
associative trails—was designed to support the mind's natural movement through knowledge rather than replace it. Augmentation, not automation: the distinction between these two objectives is not semantic but structural, and it is the hinge on which every consequential question about the current AI transition turns. The machine that extends human judgment is a different instrument from the machine that supplants it, and Bush, who had spent a career designing scientific instruments and managing the