I bragged that his lifelong interest of singing and collecting and playing and reading about the music of the thirties and forties had been rendered null and void by a simple google on our sleek computers.


Ever see the original Star Trek episode where Kirk is accused of screwing up and killing his lifelong buddy and his lawyer is the quirky guy with the stacks of paper books?

We have tons of data on the web, but precious little to tie it together. It's barely information - with only a smattering of knowledge - and a maybe an equal amount of anti-knowledge.

David Brin has two series of books, the first of which starts with a volume called "Sundiver." In some ways it's kinda typical SF. But there's some intriguing stuff in there. The gist is this: There are innumerable species in the galaxy. No species becomes intelligent through natural processes. Rather, every starfaring species became so through a process callled 'uplift' whereby they were created by Patrons as simpler forms and nurtured and groomed into intelligence and eventual ascendence to the heavens. The oldest known Patrons were the long disappeared Progenitors. However, the community of starfarers eventually find this species called humanity on a remote place called Earth that is a wolfling race. They cause considerable debate because some believe that they just evolved on their own - that they uplifted themselves by their own bootstraps as it were (clearly absurd), while others are pretty sure that earthlings were created, partially uplifted, and abandoned by a criminal Patron race (there are many, many galactic laws and traditions regarding uplift).

Ah, but to the point ... once a race becomes star-faring and perhaps a Patron themselves, they get a copy of The Great Library - an electronic collection of everything ever known by any of the thousands and thousands of races that ever existed. Against strong resistence a copy is given to the wolflings (some believe that our world needs to be exterminated as an abomination). After some time it becomes pretty clear to us that our version of the library seems to have been dumbed down in some way - that the search capabilities are entirely insufficient.

So much for metaphor.

No matter how much data or even information is on the web, for the forseeable future we're always going to need people with experience and understanding to tie it together. In "The Matrix," you just jack-in and become a kung-fu expert or a veteran helicopter pilot in minutes. Until that day, we're going to need lifetimes to piece the jigsaw together - that or resort to pleading with that quirky librarian to help us lay out the big picture.

k