There is a piece on foreignpolicy.com's blog today on forecasting the future and why it is so hard. Interestingly, the one current forecast that the blogger finds promising is that nanorobotics will allow us to think faster and directly connect to wireless networks. I think the problem is not our lack of processing speed. Searching for information is already fast enough. The problem we have is evaluating this information. We can already get a million hits on every Google search.
What we need are better filters and evaluators. That will take something totally different. We need wisdom engines to go along with our search engines. We need a way to get people to stop using our information processing capabilities (natural and electronic) to look for holes in positions we don't like (and not in the ones we do like) and to stop using them to find personal rationalizations to discount good arguments.
Unfortunately, I don't see that in our future.
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