If you’re like me, you are increasingly dependent on your computers. We’ve become so reliant on technology that it’s importance seems to get lost as it runs in the background of our lives, slowly changing itself and ourselves. Sometimes it seems like technology is just getting faster, but not better. We heard the promises of machine intelligence long ago, but failed to notice that it has now arrived. And while we are not to the point of direct, invasive connections with our machines, they are nonetheless augmenting our intelligence as we speak.
For the time being, most of this augmentation is passive. Gmail collects every email (and chat) I’ve ever sent or received into a massive database that now extends 5 years into the past. Likewise, Google Reader has been collecting every post from every blog I read for the last year. And Evernote holds every quote, or clipping I want to remember. These databases of knowledge are not as readily accessible as my memories, but in fact they are better precisely because I don’t need to remember them. When I choose to call them up with a simple search, they are reproduced exactly as they were, not as a vague remembrance.
For the time being, we do not have these databases plugged directly into our brains. However, the tools for accessing this data get better every day. My new favorite tool is Ubiquity . Ubiquity integrates my existing web databases and services into a simple command interface that uses plain language to complete complex tasks. This demo explains:
As our databases and services become more and more connected they will also become more intelligent, giving us more of the information we want, faster, and linking us with information outside of our own collection. When the day arrives that I do plug in, I will have instant access to my collection of quotes, clippings, audio, and video, as if it were my own memories. In the mean time, we can start our collections now, preserving them for our futures.
