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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance – these are what make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of community.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, Science and the Common UnderstandingEvolution proceeds in many waves, some brief by human temporal sensibilities and some lasting for centuries. Some changes in information seeking take place before technological investments are fully amortized (e.g., the latest CPU or software upgrade brings with it access to new information resources), and some take place over careers as strategies and patterns of use learned in school evolve based on new sources and tools. This final chapter examines one long-term change that computing technology brings to cognition in general and to information seeking in particular, considers how different domains interact to influence the evolution of information seeking, and concludes with some ideas about what types of systems we should strive to build.
Amplification and augmentation
Applying computational power to information problems has been a research and design goal from the first days of computing. The dreams of language translation and cybernetic assistants have given way to dreams of artificial realities and intelligent agents, but our fascination with the manipulation of symbolic data and with interactivity remains a driving force behind much of the research in artificial intelligence and engineering. One way to consider how computation may be applied to information problems is to examine how it may be applied to amplify and augment intellect.
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