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It is Year 2050
What would you use your brain for when everyone knows everything because we can all do online searches from memory?
My brother, who is a tech entrepreneur, asked me this question in 2015. We were having an argument on whether it was still important to store things in memory given that one could do a quick online search and have substantial information on any subject matter. His argument was that in times past, the test of knowledge was premised upon how much information people memorized, and how much of it they could recall. He pointed to the direction of computer hardware evolution as the basis for his argument. His prediction is that in the world of the future, we won’t need a lot of internal memory capacity, because knowledge would be central and instantly accessible without the need for a device interface.
Imagine you could think up a Google search and have access to all the information out there on the subject of your consideration. Now imagine that the rest of humankind had this same access too. What will intelligence mean in that world?
We all know at least one trivia god that knows (or seems to know) something about everything. Never mind that in the days before Google searches there was no quick way of verifying that what they were saying was fact, or that they were as…
