I'd like to begin with a mystery. Something that has been puzzling me for a couple of years. Why is Vannevar Bush not celebrated as a great American hero? Now part of this question is simple curiosity. The fragments I have picked up about Bush intrigue me and I want to know more. But there is more to this question than that. I believe that this may be one of those high yield questions that begins a process that opens up potentials and opportunities that might otherwise remain concealed.

Like many others I believe that we are now at an historical turning point as significant as the first Agricultural Revolution in Neolithic times or the more recent Industrial Revolution. Such a sentiment has become something of a cliche and as such has lost much of its force. Somehow, despite the mounting evidence that things really are going to be different we go on behaving as if the change we see around us is a minor blip and very soon everything will get back to normal. Never-the-less cliche or not, what has been happening over the last twenty or thirty years indicates that something significantly different is taking place. This is one of the veryfew things I am confident about. Our world is in a period of radical change, whether we like it or not.

Getting a fix on what is happening right now, let alone in the near future, is hard. There is so much noise in the system it is difficult to get to the information - information being defined here as that which changes us. My question about Bush is just one quest for information. For, the women and men we choose to celebrate as heroes can tell us a lot about what we value and the nature of our society, culture and aspirations. Equally, if there are those who have heroic qualities, but remain relatively obscure and uncelebrated, an exploration of why this should be the case may yield other valuable insights.

Unlike many of the questions that are asked today I genuinely don't know the answer to the one I have just posed. Nor am I going to pretend to even begin to answer it here. But my intuition is that it is a valuable question that could tell us much about how well equipped we are morally and conceptually to deal with the kind of radical change we are living with. More importantly the kind of answers we get may point us in the direction of the kind of thing we are going to need to learn and the kind of things we are going to need to do differently if we as people, as businesses, as societies are going to prosper rather than fragment in this new world we are building.

But back to Bush. Fifty years ago Vannevar Bush published his seminal paper 'As We May Think' in The Atlantic Monthly. Now widely cited in any serious writing about Hypermedia, it is a staggeringly visionary piece. Understandably, like Babbage's computer, much of the technology he proposed now seems charmingly archaic, but the design proposals and functional specification are as fresh and insightful today as when he wrote it.

And, even though technology has zoomed ahead since then, how much have we really learned in the fifty years that followed? On the face of it, not a lot. Take, for example, this small extract and imagine that it was written today:

" Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential." ("Macintosh Hypermedia" by Michael Fraase.)

Let's say that again; "this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential." Do I hear echoes here of Tom Valovic's two pieces on " The quality of information"?

But to continue.....

Question: Who has had more books written about him Bill Gates or Vannevar Bush?

Answer: I know of at least two books about Bill Gates. I don't know of any books about Vannevar Bush - if any one does please let me know. Now this is more curious than it may seem. I know Bill Gates is a very, very important man and that Microsoft may rule the world one day and that Vannevar Bush is long since buried. But, of the two, even dead, Vannevar Bush may be a far more significant figure and his life may carry valuable lessons we could both learn from and benefit from now.

This year as we hit the fiftieth anniversary of the two A bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Bush's name may pop up as the man who wrote the memo that launched the Manhattan Project. But even then he is likely to remain relatively obscure and the full range of his achievements and influence hidden from view. And this in a man who was top class as an inventor, engineer, entrepreneur, businessman, administrator, academic, mentor, public servant, eminence gris, and visionary. A man whose impact on the US and the development of science, technology and business may have been profound. A man who may indirectly have been responsible for the medium through which you reading this, the Internet itself.

So why do we know so much about Bill Gates and so little about Vannevar Bush?

Why is there so much connected information about Bill Gates and such fragmented information about Vannevar Bush? Maybe it's that list that is part of the problem? Let's look at it another way.

inventor engineer entrepreneur businessman administrator academic mentor public servant eminence gris visionary

We are used to people who excel in any one of those categories, but someone who excels in all of them some how falls through our conceptual net. Vannevar Bush is a pattern that doesn't connect. Everything I know aboutBush and the pattern of his influence is made of disconnected fragments - a couple of sentences in a book here, a few paragraphs from some old reference books there, another bit from there and so - a kind of proto-hypertext. Most of the clues that shout out maybe this guy really is important, maybe we could still learn a lot more from him, I have stumbled across by accident while looking for other things. It could be that Bush is just too complex a figure for us to cope with and if that's right then we really are in trouble.

Could Bush himself be a victim of the phenomenon of "..truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential." ?

Gregory Bateson wrote "Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality." What seems to have happened over the past fifty years is that while connections proliferate, patterns of connection have been disrupted, destroyed and obliterated. Alvin Toffler captures this sense of swirling, whirling, contradictory change well: "It's the computer - but it's not just the computer. It's the biological revolution - but it's not just the biological revolution. It's the shift in energy forms. It's the new geopolitical balance in the world. It's the revolt against patriarchy. It's credit cards plus video games plus stereo plus Walkman units. It's localism plus globalism. It's smart typewriters and information workers and electronic banking. It's the push for decentralization. At one end it's the space shuttle - at the other the search for individual identity. It's flex-time and robots and the rising militancy of black and brown and yellow people on the planet. It's the combined impact of all these forces converging on and shattering our traditional industrial way of life. Above all, it's the acceleration of change, itself, which marks our moment in history."

As John Brunner, that visionary writer, who has mysteriously disappeared from the science fiction shelves, once wrote: "It is one thing to talk glibly about the determinism of history but quite another thing altogether to find oneself caught up in historical forces like dead leaf on the gale." For many of us the image of the dead leaf being blown hither and thither by social, cultural, political, technological and economic forces we don't understand and barely recognise, may have a powerful resonance.

But Brunner has also given us another, more optimistic image: the Shockwave Rider, surfing the waves of change, exhilarated by the ride. It is this image, I hope, that will have a still greater resonance. For it is the very turmoil we see around us, that is the grounds for my optimism. Amidst the destruction and disruption of the patterns of our daily lives, new possibilities are being created, if only we can sense them. A new landscape of human being is waiting for us to nudge into existence, if we so choose.

"The great landscape gardener, Lancelot Brown, when confronted with a client's estate, did not say "what is your problem?", he asked "what are the capabilities of this piece of land?". Optimism, generality, and scope flowed where otherwise all would have been pessimism, specificity, and narrowness. That is what is wrong with conventional wisdom: not enough Capability Browns and too many Problematic Tom, Dicks and Harrys."

Vannevar Bush seems to have been a Capability Brown seeing capabilities where others only saw problems or saw confusion and mess or maybe saw nothing at all. Maybe that's why he could be so good at so many different things. Maybe the way he approached inventing the Differential Analyser - one of the first simulators and the Memex - his hypothetical hypermedia machine, founding Raytheon - now a major corporation, coordinating scientific research in the US during WWII, working at very senior level at MIT and the long list of his other achievements was based on an ability to see capabilities rather than just problems.

And where would Bush be searching for capabilities now? I suspect he would have spotted an opportunity space in the puzzle of why we as a species seem to find it so hard to learn what would be useful to us. Instead we seem to be more comfortable running old programs, some of them millions of years old, in a mindless, automatic, and oh so smugly, certain way, despite being bombarded with evidence that they just don't work any more.

I suspect that Bush would have focused a lot of attention on the process of learning and how to improve it. Now by learning I don't mean a process of accumulating facts or regurgitating other people's ideas, even though that can be valuable in itself. I do mean a process of changing the way we see the world and how we act in it. Not as a one off, but as a continuous, playful, improvisation driven by the pleasure of secure uncertainty.

What makes me think that Bush would have been drawn to this opportunity space? Well the puzzles are interesting in themselves, the potential leverage is great - even a small increase in our capacity to learn could yield enormous human benefits, and, being a practical man, he would be conscious that this is an area where doing good could be good business too.

One of his starting points might be the puzzle of cybernetics. He knew Nobert Weiner, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, at MIT and I guess it's quite likely that he would have read Weiner's "The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society". Had he been able to look back from now he probably would have been intrigued by the way we happily apply the principles of cybernetics to machines, but conspicuously fail to apply those insights to the organisation of human affairs.

Indeed, the only large scale attempt to apply cybernetic insights into running a national economy in real time, under the Allende government in Chile in the early seventies, was ruthlessly crushed as a side effect of the US-backed coup 1973. Destroying a democratically elected government, torturing, killing and disappearing thousands of people and installing a military dictatorship is the kind of crime that the forces of organised stupidity have committed for years, in both the East and the West. But destroying an experiment from which we could have learned much, whether it succeed or failed, without even realising they were doing so, is an almost unprecedented triumph of stupidity. I am using 'stupidity' here in a very precise, even technical way. In this definition it is the inability of the brain or any other part of nature to accept useful information, learn from it, and act intelligently on it.

The mystery of the comparative neglect of cybernetics is only one example of our failure to try out the ideas, concepts and hard won knowledge that have been developed over the past fifty years, preferring instead to cling on to the mishmash of survival techniques from the savannas and the half remember ideas of long dead theorists that we confuse with practical commonsense. How often have you presented a new idea to a suit and met a blank quasi-religious face unthinkingly, but triumphantly, chanting the mantra 'But where's the bottom line?' as if it really meant something?

As an entrepreneur and businessman, Vannevar Bush knew something about the bottom line. But as an inventor and engineer I doubt whether he would have been naive enough to believe a single output was enough to track a complex system, especially when that output invariably contains an element of fiction. I don't know whether he would have agreed with Charles Hampden Turner's diagnosis, but I suspect he might.

Hampden Turner argues that "the notion that any one value or criterion of excellence pursued in isolation is almost bound to steer you intotrouble, even catastrophe ." And goes on to say "All values are relative, you may think, but the need to profit, that is the one pure truth beneath the shifting sands, that is the commercial equivalent of fundamentalist scripture. When all other values have been finely balance, virtuously circled and transformed into larger meaning, profit will remain 'the bottom line', the ultimate arbiter of the effectiveness of overall strategy. I fear this is just not so." He then goes on to give nine good reasons why the pursuit of profit as a single goal, rather than one of a complex mix of goals, is like the hunt for the unicorn, a fruitless quest.

An extreme example of the potential dangers of the single minded pursuit of profit may be found in what has happened with currency trading. Up until the early seventies the amounts involved in currency trading roughly balanced world trade, with a little speculative froth on top. In the eighties the synergy between technology and our more primitive systems of thinking resulted in an explosion of currency trading. Up until the seventies the highest trading volumes per year were around three trillion dollars. In 1984 the figures were about 32 trillion dollars, 1985 it double to 65 trillions and by 1987 it had reached 87 trillion dollars - 23 times the US GNP.

The scale of these figures is alarming in itself, but what is even scarier is the dramatic shift in the ratio between currency trading and world trade - the exchange of real goods and services. Up until the seventies the ratio was roughly one to one by the mid eighties world trade only accounted for ten per cent of the 87 trillion dollars being traded in the currency markets. Now, this is not just a game of winners and losers played among the currency dealers themselves. At its crudest what it means is that your livelihood, your business, the standard of living and rate of employment in your country is being affected, positively or negatively, by people on an adrenaline high. People operating in a world as artificially simple as roulette table.

Like the mystery of Vannevar Bush this extraordinary phenomenon seems largely invisible. It occupies very little public debate. Maybe, there is intense discussion at the higher levels of government and commerce, but if so little of it filters through to the general consciousness. At present in my country there is a ferocious argument between different factions of our ruling party about whether we should give up the pound in favour of an european currency. Much is made of the surrender of sovereignty that would be involved should we do so. Opponents of the moves towards an european currency argue that its adoption would remove many economic decisions away from our parliament and government and into european institutions. This is true. But what no seems to mention, despite a forced devaluation a couple of years ago, is that already many of these decisions have already largely moved into the dealing rooms of the international banks. It their, often primitive, notions of what constitutes sensible economic policy, that will influence what your government can or cannot do. And this true for you too, what ever country you happen to live in and whatever kind of government you happen to have.

Now I don't raise this issue to bash the currency dealers. After all they have simply taken the opportunities to extend their game opened up by information technology and the world wide moves to deregulate financial markets. There are two things that are significant about this example. Firstly nobody really understands what is going on. It looks as if this new system should be extremely unstable and yet despite the odd crisis and panic the system appears to be more robust than we expect. There may be a major financial catastrophe waiting to happen, but it hasn't happened yet. Secondly, this is a very dramatic example of the kind of deep discontinuities that are developing in the system we live in. While financial trading has leapt into the future our political and economic systems lag way behind.

Two ideas identified by Stewart Brand may help us grapple with some the implications of these kinds of deep discontinuity. Robert V. Neill and some co-workers studying complex systems such as redwood forests came up the insight that; "The dynamics of the system will be dominated by the slow components, with the rapid components simply following along." Brand adds Buzz Holling's comment on this insight that" it is times of major change in a system that the quick processes can most influence the slow."

I could imagine Vannevar Bush turning his mind to these two important insights to see if what seems to be a general rule applies to the kind of systems we have developed over the last couple of millions years. If they do apply, what are the slow components of our system and are they changing? And which are the quick processes that can most influence the slow? And can any of these processes be nudged in a direction that will benefit humankind as a whole?

I have a guess that one of the slow processes is how we think and learn. I have another apparently contradictory guess that one of the quick processes is how we think and learn. At times it seems as our mental processes are best fitted for life as gatherer/hunters, when it seems we went through our most rapid period of learning as species, and that we are peculiarly unfitted for the world we have built for ourselves in the years that followed. But we did create that world and had to think and learn to do so. And some ideas, like the idea of woman's liberation, seem to spread as fast as a fire in a tinder dry forest, and one way or another, have changed the way we think and live now, in a relatively short period of time.

Vannevar Bush's Memex was an attempt to envision how technology could be used to help us think and learn more effectively. If anything the need to increase our capacity to learn and learn fast has increased several fold in the fifty years that have followed. I lied at little when at the opening of this piece I said I had no answer to the mystery of Bush's relative obscurity. I do have a very tentative guess. I suspect that Bush has remained relatively obscure because he is too complex as a figure and somehow we resent the effort required to put him together. Just as we seem to resist applying cybernetics to human life because that requires us to put things together and to abandoned our simple minded notions of causality.

In the past there may have been some advantage in our apparent predilection for the simple over the complex. But as Bush recognised the world we have created is complex, with many subtle threads of connection between our individual actions all over the globe. We now need to learn how to read these complex, subtle patterns of connection and interaction if we are to avoid the fate of the dead leaf on the gale and to enjoy the opportunities to move among the waves of change like Shockwave Riders. Many people are looking for the killer app, the thing that will unlock the promised bounty of the internet and hypermedia. It may have been there all the time. Despite our waves of acknowledgement to Bush's Memex how many people apart from those other early pioneers Douglas Englebart and Ted Nelson and, more recently, Alan Kay, Bill Atkinson and Tim Berners-Lee have been concerned about trying to create machines to think with. (This is an enormous slight to all those I have forgotten or don't know about, and to them I unreservedly apologise, but the general point holds) But if you are looking for a capability space that offers the opportunity for fun, challenge, profit and the chance to benefit your fellow humans, what better than a modern Memex?

Project Vannevar, as I am sure Bush would now agree, would have to go much further than his original specification for the Memex. One of the limitations of the Memex and Memex like systems is the focus on content rather than process. The general model seems to be one of text in a library and providing means of developing different patterns of connection between chunks of text. This is the way this piece has been composed. I write something which reminds me of something I have read, which in turn sparks off some thoughts which reminds me of something else I have read and in the process of trying to find that I stumble across something else which suddenly seems relevant which in turn sparks off some thoughts, and so on and so on.

This is fine as far as it goes. But I think we could go much further. What we need is something like a construction kit for thinking with. Something that would encourage us to play with ideas. This could include things like Vannevar Bush's idea of associative trails through existing material developed by adventurous people. These could provide some inspiring models. But computers can provide much more stimulating and playful forms of interaction.

Many of the elements for a modern Memex construction kit already exist. I first got really excited by Apple's Macintosh many years ago, when it was still considered a toy, after I saw a demonstration of Stella - a program that enabled the user to build graphical models of dynamic systems and watch what happened to them over time. Peter Senge uses it to help business people understand the dynamic systems they operate in. There are some outliners that allow you to play graphically with networks of ideas and concepts and then translate those nets into the traditional list form. Imagine what such an outliner would be like if instead of operating in two dimensions it was three dimensional like some of the interfaces that Xerox has developed. There is a programme that ask a scriptwriter a series of challenging questions to help her clarify her ideas about a script proposal. There are programs like IdeaFisher that encourage its users to free associate about the conceptual tasks they are involved in. There are educational programmes that present the user with a problem and then allow them to interrogate different experts to give them the information to solve it.

The more you think about it the more stuff there is around. But they are all isolates, discrete tools. The only exception that I know about is the work at Douglas Englebart's Bootstrap Institute, which I've read about but never seen. So how close his system is to my blurred vision I don't know. I suspect that the elements in his system might be more closely coupled that what I have in mind. The picture I have is closer to the way a graphic designer or hypermedia designer working on the Mac can draw on a range of specialist programs and move between them seamlessly. Or the mass of add ons to programmes like Lotus 123, or Notes or Quark Xpress that allows their users create an environment that has a closer fit to the way that they work and the particular specialist tasks they are involved in.

It could be the basis for a modern Memex is something like Netscape Navigator, ECash, and a multitude of=20specialist tool and content linkers, content providers, and conceptual tool developers providing the kit of elements that would allow individuals and groups to amplify their learning and think processes. The element of ECash may be crucial. While much of the development of the internet and the World Wide Web has been motivated by a spirit of generosity, which I hope will remain an intrinsic part of the ethos, some material reward for that generosity of spirit may be an essential incentive ensure the necessary quality of tools and content. Again we have echoes of Vannevar Bush who managed to combine, and keep properly separate, a sense of public duty and service and a healthy entrepreneurial concern for material reward.

There is, of course, a big question mark hovering over this whole exercise. If human beings are, as I have implied, so addicted to what Ellen J.Langer calls mindlessness why should technology make any difference? Isn't it the social context in which a technology develops that determines how that technology is used? Wouldn't it be more plausible to argue that it is our mindlessness that our technology will amplify rather than our potential for mindfulness. In more pessimistic moments I would be reluctantly forced to agree. But there is a but. There is something about computer technology, the internet, hypermedia that has qualities of the playful, the infinitely malleable. Our old,mechanical industrial technology, both as a metaphor and a reality, tended in its mature phase to reinforce the rigidity of our categories and simple minded notions of cause and effect. On a typewriter I pressed the key marked q and the letter q was imprinted on the page in a clear act of mechanical linkage. On a similar keyboard on a computer pressing the key marked q could have all sorts of very different results depending on the program that was running.

It is here I see a glimmer of hope. Extraordinary women and men have always displayed qualities of mindfulness. Maybe, just maybe, a modern Memex could nudge some of the rest of us into a more mindful way of being. But who is going to conceive it, who is going to push for it, who is going to make it happen. Vannevar Bush where are you, now that we need you?