After reading about the inner workings of search engines, and rethinking the question you asked a few months back: where do you think computers are going?, I would guess that in fulfilling their ultimate job as tools and therefore extensions of ourselves, computers will inevitably become appended to our persons, inside and out, until there comes a point at which they are hard to distinguish from the human organism even in biological terms. I suppose this is trans humanism.

I picture some object, perhaps microscopic?, that interacts with one’s thoughts without the need for verbal communication, and which is at once connected to all indexed electronic information and all other persons. Querying information will simply be as easy as thinking “what is 7×7″ and the computer, instead of our brain, or perhaps only if our brain does not have that information, will respond “7×7 is 7 objects 7 times over, the answer is 49″.

I imagine this will have a profound effect upon education and the idea of knowledge and ‘being smart’ as we currently understand them. I don’t think this will necessarily lead to a degeneration of the human mind, instead, those who can ask better questions and who know when to use these questions will become the ’smart’ ones or maybe the successful ones or the dominant ones.

The stumbling block right now is NOT that we think quicker than computers, so that they are not able to keep up with what we want them to do; the shortfall is in human engineering on a Userability front. This problem is best illustrated by the keyboards we use, whose layout was devised in the 19th century to slow typists, whose quick fingers would jam the earliest typewriters!