Homo Indicium

Homo is Latin for man or human being. Indicium is Latin for information.

As user agents become more intelligent and autonomous, man and machine move closer towards a time when both shall be as one. Already men are pushing the limits of hybridization with apparel with built in video and audio recording devices that constantly evaluate appropriate experiences to catalogue and do so with ever improving efficiency at indexing “on the fly”. Miniscule in size, but giant in functionality, a multitude of sensors can record and store countless vital statistics on the health and well being of a human master as the human goes about daily life with little intrusion from these small miracles. These wonders exist today in experimental form. At the rate at which technological breakthroughs are accelerating, the experiment will soon move into the mainstream. With search technology evolving in parallel, we will have the means of finding individual datum in digital storage in a fashion similar to the ways in which we would locate memories in the past, and likely just as quickly. (Czerwinski, et al)

In short, Information Man will augment his memory and access thereof with automation that will likely prove faster and more reliable. With miniaturization advances, these experimental peripherals will eventually be internalized and become one with the normal human access to the world around him. Infants will be implanted at birth, and perhaps sooner, with the means to digitally store a lifetime’s worth of searchable digital memories.

But this won’t stop with individual augmentation. With the interconnectedness made plain of all things digital which the Web makes possible, we will be able to choose to make our digital histories available to anyone with access to the data structures and their content evolving currently on the Web. We will be able to make the choice of becoming one with everything. And when this possibility becomes inevitable reality, the lines between man and information will blur.