James Drogan

Re Conversations with Dave

I think, Dave, you want TiVo "...to capture Charlie Rose, the BBC world news, the Nightly Bus Report and the CPT ed programs on Sa morning for watching at my conveinance as well as building up an archive of Rose, etc."  Or you could, as I sometimes do, set up the VCR to record on a scheduled basis.

Building the archive is the easy part.  The hard part is the indexing, search, and retrieval of the material of interest.  That may be just an add-on to iTunes.  Pretty slick stuff that iTunes.  Then you can extend the Amazon metaphor to have a system -- like a news aggregator -- that continually learns about your interests, constantly looks at what's going on in the world, and brings it to your attention.  Sort of an add-on to the associative functions of the mind.

Then, we plant a box in your brain that senses your interests and automatically -- look ma, no hands -- interfaces with  super iTunes/Tivo and what you want is there when you want it.

Finally, the box learns enough to take over and you won't be able to tell a good single malt from Dago Red.

You must read Kurzweil.

Coming back to earth, let me probe along the following lines.  Who will be able to afford this extravaganza?  Who will know how to use it?  It may be great for you, but will it widen the gap between the classes?

Are we beginning to spend so much time managing data and information that our ability to generate knowledge is impacted?

Curiosity killed the cat.  What's in store for us?