Techonolgy: The Augmentation of Human Intellect

This weeks articles were a bit difficult to fully understand in their ideas, but this is what I gathered from the readings.

In "AS WE MAY THINK", by Vannevar Bush, he talks about how during the war scientists used technology to increase man's physical power to defeat their enemies. But it wasn't physical power Bush was really interested in, it was our mental strength. How to use technology to increase our intelligence and way of life. "For many years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind."
He used many examples and I thought that some of his predictions of how future technology would be were rather accurate. He predicted that "dry photography" would soon be real and common place in cameras, with the number of pictures that could be taken becoming almost limitless, as well as the speed in which they were developed.
Bush goes on to speak of how technology has and will continue to shape our way of life by making things such as the gathering of information easier. How much we can learn will be affected by technology, and so in effect he believes that technology has helped shape society.

In "AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework", all the authors seem to lean towards the same conclusion, that in the past technology has mostly been used to increase mankind's physical power, but that the future is how technology will increase our mental capacity. The readings here talk about how the human intellect can be augmented to increase its mental capacity to learn. "By 'augmenting human intellect' we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems" states Engelbart.
They also talk about each individual layer and piece of an object or framework, which is much more in depth than most people would ever think of going into. They use the example of a computer.
"When one looks at a computer system that is doing a very complex job, he sees on the surface a machine that can execute some extremely sophisticated processes. If he is a layman, his concept of what provides this sophisticated capability may endow the machine with a mysterious power to sweep information through perceptive and intelligent synthetic thinking devices."
On the surface a computer gives us a 3d image of whatever information we typed in and allows us to communicate and find information easily and quickly. But underneath its outward shiny casing are RAM, sound cards, graphic cards, microchips etc, that are all connected to a motherboard so on and so forth. And going even deeper into the next layer are the tiny bits that make up the microchips etc. A normal person would not be able to explain how each layer works, but an electrical engineer could explain this, while a computer programmer could explain that, and the list goes on. So from their perspective, the smaller bits and pieces that are just as important,if not more so, than the end result.
At the same time it's such technology that has been taken for granted and helped shape our society. I think they all agree that we have shaped ourselves around our technology, enhancing or augmenting ourselves with it to increase that which we can understand and do.