The Ten Most Important Emerging Technologies for Humanity
In
decades past, intelligence was largely determined by how much an individual could
remember. Each person was expected to carry their own personal library in their heads, and
a lack of ability in storing or retrieving information from those mental
libraries would result in
scholastic failure or, in too many cases, being labeled intellectually inferior.
In the near future, the rules will change. Intelligence will be much less about what you can store in
your head and much more about your ability to quickly locate, organize and understand information
gleaned from global information sources such as the Internet. A person who knows very little
about a subject but who can quickly find and organize relevant information on that subject will be
far more productive than someone unfamiliar with information search and retrieval technologies,
regardless of their mental capacity.
Today, Internet search engines like Google and desktop search software like dtSearch are pioneers
that will likely pollinate emerging technologies in this area. Yet even Google, as advanced as it
may seem on the Internet, is little more than an early prototype in search technology. Google has
no technology to understand the intent of the searcher, for example, other than a rudimentary
analysis of a string of text characters. A more advanced search engine would operate through
voice queries and be capable of retrieving results deemed relevant to the interests of the particular
user. A nutritionist who searches for “pizza,” for example, would likely be interested in something
quite different from a hungry college student entering the same search query.
Even as search personalization advances, there’s also the much larger question of what knowledge
or content is available to be searched. Google searches only the Internet, and while that may
represent a significant
quantity of information, it is but a small portion of the total knowledge
available on the planet. What’s needed to uplift our civilization is a Global Electronic Library.
