"As We May Think" is an essay by
Vannevar Bush, first published in
The Atlantic in July 1945 and republished in an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts toward destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of
collective memory machine with his concept of the
memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.