Universal Access

Brewster Kahle describes in this TED talk the attempt to provide universal access to all human knowledge.

It is a bit of a race at the moment and I know there are many commercial companies doing similar projects. Kahle describes it as our ages opportunity to one up the Greeks. A modern Library of Alexandria on crack.

It does redefine everything though. If you are able to put every piece of music, every motion picture, every written word within reach. If on top of that you are able to provide filters that sort through the noise, there is almost no bound to what can be achieved.

Previously the physical inaccessibility of knowledge held the world back incredibly. The thousands of years of slow progress till people were able to communicate through language. The speeding up of that process as we were able to read and write. The even faster growth as we became able to understand all the languages that were out there.

At each stage, certain groups controlled that knowledge. The church had tremendous power when the Bible was only in an unintelligible language to the illiterate masses. Science, Mathematics, and History were restricted to those who had access to the books.

But the only boundary for human creativity is the limits of our imagination, then we are in for some rapid progress.

Today's new born children are going to laugh at the idea that there used to be `rare' songs that were difficult to find, or videos that were not in stock at the physical store that we went to.

It will be difficult to hide or manipulate the truth about everything, even if that truth requires interpretation through the noise.

Exciting Times.