Full Circle

As search agents join with man and become self aware, and as man becomes hyperaware, giving a self-awareness to humanity that can only come from the introspection of an entire species made possible through a universal interconnectedness, we must remember from whence it all began. If the records are lost or destroyed, humanity must still look back for the fossil evidence in this and other documents and remember its origins. In this evolutionary incarnation, man will partner with his tools to take the next step. And as man and tool advance together, the ages that will come to pass will be synonymous with the relationship that man and tool share.

Perhaps if we were better at Ben Franklin’s virtue called “Order”, the search would never have become a desired selectable trait. And if Vannevar Bush had not been correct in his vision of an associative search tool, we would have muddled through with painstaking and tedious indexing and cataloguing efforts in an ever expanding Web universe. Maybe if the market pressure on an emerging Google had been less, latent semantic indexing would never have been desirable to evolve. And maybe if man would have taken his time growing into the product of his informative environment the growing pains would have been lessened.

And maybe if we hadn’t have had to learn to use tools to survive we would never have stopped running from the predators long enough to contemplate our own existence.

As individuals, we can choose to ignore the pressures that affect the collective. As a collective, we must follow the paths set out for us and explore our possibilities. Homo Indicium is but one possibility. But in the absence of other compelling pressures, Homo Indicium is the likely next step in human evolution. It would be best to sharpen our tools as we set out to face our future.