Here, Bush goes beyond the prediction of technological advancement to accurately forecast how those advances have altered the nature of contemporary education. Through many conversations with my parents, I have observed in my own life how classes increasingly step away from rote task execution and memorization in favor of higher-order skills and abilities that benefit students born into the digital era. I can vividly recall receiving "Google" lessons from my high school librarian, whose own role had shifted in the decades since she first began working at the school like every other librarian in the business of information retrieval.

Prior to reading the biography for Bush, I was simply floored by the seemingly superhuman and prophetic nature of his insights into the future that me makes in this piece. Knowing now that Bush coordinated the 6000-strong scientific workforce of WWII America, I feel much better thinking of Bush as just another person... though still equally prophetic. It is as if Bush developed an intuitive understanding of the trajectory of scientific advancement in America just as one might watch a ball fall through the air.

"The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology." ~ Edward O. Wilson

It is easy for me to forget as a child of the early 21st century that there was once a world before the digital age as well as the industrial era, both of which contributed some of the most notable "god-like" technological advances of which Wilson speaks. The historical juxtaposition that Bush calls attention to here, as with other lines in his piece, make me consider how we too are the Pharaohs relative to our own distant future.

I think that this line is perhaps the most important line in the entire piece. Bush had already seen how someone could theoretically delegate the automatic and logical operation of arithmetic to a machine by aligning the pattern of machine behavior with patterns of human thought. In my opinion, his chief insight in this piece is the alignment of machine behavior with human thought in the specific context of information retrieval. And where else could this insight have sprung into his head but from his own personal experiences coordinated the vastly complicated work of no less than 6000 premiere American scientists!

Though Bush envisioned much of the World Wide Web (WWW) as it is today, it is striking to me that his idea of "trails" got entirely left out in the final iteration of hypertext system technology that soon grew to be the WWW.

Importantly, I believe that trails would have disrupted assumptions made by Google's PageRank algorithm about browser user behavior, though I am not certain. Ultimately, it would seem simple enough to either design a trails-inclusive algorithm instead, or simply ignore them for the purposes of search engines.