Saturday, December 04, 2004

Data Appliance

Now that so much fact-based information is available for free (and hopefully remains this way) on the Internet, the emphasis is no longer on knowing information but rather on being able to find it when it is needed. Why not a data appliance or prosthesis, initially external, that provides a suite of audio-visual information by "hearing" key words as they are spoken, or as the appliance is explicitly addressed. Multiple human parties in the discussion can view the data beam to inform themselves and debate the higher level aspects of the topic.

This and other factors are causing several to envision revolutionary new models of education in the future. We can now divide information into two great camps - freely available and not available. Relationships with people, status and the traditional hierarchical structure of the world grant access to the unavailable information. How valuable is it anymore anyway? It wants to be free and spread meme-like as much as it can. What is the incentive for classified data to remain locked up? It dies.