Computing as a Tool for Thinking

There is a tradition in computing older than the personal computer, older than the programming language you use, nearly as old as the electronic computer itself: the belief that the machine's highest purpose is to augment human thinking.

It begins with Vannevar Bush, who in 1945 imagined the memex — a desk that would store all your books and link them by association, the way the mind actually works. J.C.R. Licklider made it a research program with Man–Computer Symbiosis (1960), then funded the future from inside ARPA. Douglas Engelbart devoted his life to augmenting the human intellect, and in the Mother of All Demos showed the world what it could look like. Ted Nelson named hypertext. Kenneth Iverson showed that notation is a tool of thought. Steve Jobs called the computer a bicycle for the mind.

The through-line is a refusal to settle for the computer as an appliance. A tool for thought doesn't do your thinking for you — it gives your thinking new leverage, new reach, new things it can grab hold of. The uncomfortable question this tradition leaves us with is how much of our time with our extraordinarily powerful devices is actually spent thinking — and how much is spent being thought at.