Humanity right now, as a whole, is able to gain knowledge at a much faster rate than its ancestors were.

Much, much faster.

Flip out your pocket sized super computer, and most of the world’s knowledge is a few taps away.

The speed at which we can obtain knowledge has been increasing at an almost exponential rate. Will it plateau soon? Maybe. Probably! But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s grown by multitudes.

About 20 years ago we got the smart phone. Even then it wasn’t yet widely adopted. Before that? We had to walk all the way to the family computer to look up some new pieces of information. 20 years before that? Your best option was likely a drive to the library. The library contains vast knowledge, but it’s limited by the physical walls of the building. You can only shelve so many books. And even then, you may overlook what you’re looking for.

The Internet has all of those books. I mean, it has virtually all the books ever.

The point is, we can know a lot more than our ancestors simply because we can access new information much quicker.

We can become, relatively speaking, experts in almost any field, simply by accessing the correct resources in cyberspace.

They say we’re ruining our attention span, our thinking, our learning, by accessing too much information too fast, but I posit something else might be going on. I believe we’re learning to learn differently. Faster. It only looks like we’re wasting time watching pointless online videos.

Actually, that’s exactly what some people are doing. They are wasting an incredible opportunity to flex this faster ability to obtain and process information, and are sullying it on 15 second videos of people trying to culturally out-edge each other.

But those people have always existed, access to computers or not. There will always be a percent of the population that would trade noble goals for frivolous distractions. There, I said it.

And yes, of course entertainment has value. But with everything – moderation.

So we’ve got access to more information, faster, and will an evolving ability to process it. If we wish. What next? Will our brains reach a limit? No matter how much oatmeal we shove in our ear, at some point it’ll start spilling out the other side.

When will this plateau happen, and how will we surmount it?

My guess is we plateau soon, reaching the limitations of our brain’s processing power. Either our AI will pick up the reigns where our own juicy pink processing power leaves off, or we’ll figure out how to safely augment our brains with computer gizmos. Or both. Maybe an AI companion that lives on a gizmo wired into your brain.

Creepy, sure, but you’d never feel alone.

Me? I’ll continue to do it the old fashioned way, without self-inflicted voices in my head.