Friday, September 10, 2010

To "know everything"

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, describes the circumstance when "all the information in the world is available at our fingertips" (presumably through always networked mobile devices, etc.) as being a circumstance when "we can literally know everything".

It is interesting that common parlance is shifting to call looking something up on the internets as knowing that something. At one level this is innocuous in that the meaning of a word or phrase is changing. But at another level this is a huge shift in culture and society.

If you want to hear Eric say the statement above, here is the link (around 11 minutes into the video).