A thought …
How did man move from the agrarian age to the industrial age? By replacing muscle with technology. Machines are better at providing power and energy.
How did man move from the industrial age to the information age? By replacing repetition with technology. Robots and computers are better at performing repetitive tasks.
How will man move from the information age to the next age? By replacing memory with technology. Machines are better at providing information when it is needed.
What kind of machines? I’m calling them retrieval machines. Some examples for technologies in this category:
- Google (Don’t have to remember anything that is easily googled)
- Tagging (Don’t have to remember where I read/saw something I may need later)
- GTD (Don’t have to remember what I’m committed to doing)
- Email and IM (Don’t have to remember what someone else can easily tell me)
Do you know this feeling when you temporarily don’t have access to something you use all the time, and it makes you feel as if parts of your brain had been amputated? That’s when you’ve hit on one of these.
So what will be left for us to do in this age? Making decisions. Recognizing patterns. Finding abstractions.
Or maybe I’m just making this up because I have really crappy memory.
and finally the technology-dominated mankind will be completely degenerated, because we do not make use of our body and memory any more – and of the stability giving power of self-carried out repetition of single or daily tasks.
… or maybe I am just a defeatist.
Yeah. This degeneration is probably inevitable. That’s evolution: If a technology is available, then those who use it will outsmart, outrun and outgun those who don’t. Until you take the toys away – then you get New Orleans.