This weekend I happened to go check out a Japanese bookstore and pick up some calligraphy gear. I love calligraphy — it has a life to it that really reminds you how much meaning is in the information we write down...

Periodically I'm reminded in these moments of a theory I have about human society, intelligence, tools, and their interaction.

Fundamentally as we know from our experience with computers, there are three important elements to processing information: processing power, information storage (memory), and communication (protocols). Each of these requires hardware to implement it, and organization or software to keep it running correctly, and working together with the other components.

We can view the human race and it's leaps forward in these terms as well. The advent of human intelligence was a revolution in processing power. This allowed us to figure out many new things, but there were of course limits. Our discovery of language was a second revolution, this time of communication, allowing us to pool our processing power to achieve even more than before. It also effectively increased our memory because we could share information stored in the memories of various people.

Writing was really the third major revolution in our history, as it vastly increased our capacity for information storage and recall, or our collective memory. Various innovations in filing, printing, etc, served to further increase the utility of this information storage system.

Now, computers are allowing us to simultaneously stretch all three of these capabilities. Currently, processing power is increasing steadily, but we are really experiencing revolutionary new capabilities due to vast increases in our memory and communication capacities. Hard drives of 100 Gigs and more will soon allow us to carry with us vast libraries of not only documents and music, but video. Important communication hubs are forming in the great cities of the world, wherein anyone can stop in at a café and communicate with people all over the planet. And the pipes continue to get fatter to accomodate our huge hard-drives.

But really, why is all this revolutionary? Because it allows us to process vastly more information than we ever could do alone. It allows us to recall and use vastly more information than we ever could do alone... In fact, I believe that the faster we get used to the idea that our human capacities are limited, that we must depend on computers to reach our full potential, the better we will be prepared for the future. Our ability to manipulate massive stores of information effectively is becoming much much more important than what we know, or can do, as an individual.

These are all reasons why I believe there is an ancillary social revolution in the works. When people finally begin to realize what I'm talking about here, there will be a massive change in the way we approach education. Rather than teaching a wide variety of facts, trying to create well-rounded individuals, we will finally realize that we should just give students the tools they need to do this themselves, saving them years of off-topic memorization, and then move on to specifics quickly. We may also allow them to return to school to change fields later, without stigma or unnecessary difficulty.

Hmmm. ;)