I am going to take a break from our regularly scheduled rotation of old guys who look like lesbians, trophy wives, and furry sex videos disguising themselves as soft drink commercials to talk about something a little lighter - The very future of the world.

Alright I am exaggerating, but in my opinion there is something very profound happening and we are on the rising edge of a social wave. I believe we are entering a period of a new enlightenment and when it’s over the world is likely to be wholly transformed.

Traditionally the enlightenment is dated to the late 17th or early 18th centuries and is typified by the movement to include rational thought and argument as proof of natural phenomenon rather than accepted wisdom and revelation. I believe that it’s origin dates back even further, to the invention of the Gutenberg press.

Prior to this invention books were scarce and concentrated in the hands of the rich and the clergy. This made the spread of new ideas far more difficult it takes longer and is more expensive to make a large of copies of a work by hand than it does to run them off on a printing press. When presses began printing more than Bibles knowledge was suddenly available to the masses. It took about a hundred and fifty years for that knowledge to reach critical mass but it did, with the likes of Hooke, Burke, Newton, Voltaire, Gibbon and Smith. Their ideas were adopted by the Founding Fathers and formed the basis for the American Revolution and the formation of the United States. In other words they changed the world. (This is a simplified overview please bear with it).

I think we are now seeing similar explosion of information available to the great unwashed masses (like me).

Today anyone with access to a laptop, which may cost as little as $150 (or $47 according to the Indian Government), has access to a vast array of general knowledge through projects such as Wikipedia, the works of the Western Canon through Project Gutenberg. Or, if they have an MP3 Player they can download free audiobooks from librivox or lectures from a number of top universities via itunes university. Importantly people are making use of the opportunity:

BERKELEY — Baxter Wood is one of Hubert Dreyfus’ most devoted students. During lectures on existentialism, Wood hangs on every word, savoring the moments when the 78-year-old philosophy professor pauses to consider a student’s comment or relay how a meaning-of-life question had him up at 2 a.m.

But Wood is not sitting in a lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, nor has he met Dreyfus. He is in the cab of his 18-wheel big rig, hauling dog food from Ohio to the West Coast or flat-screen TVs from Los Angeles to points east.The 61-year-old trucker from El Paso eavesdrops on the lectures by downloading them for free from Apple Inc.’s iTunes store, transferring them to his Hewlett-Packard digital media player, then piping them through his cabin’s speakers. He hits pause as he approaches cities so he can focus more on traffic than on what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead, then shifts his attention back to the classroom.

…

By making hundreds of lectures from elite academic institutions available online for free, Apple is reinvigorating the minds of people who have been estranged from the world of ideas.

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Retirees in Long Beach and Weaverville, Calif., halibut fishermen in Alaska, data entry clerks in London, casting agents in New York — all separated from the classroom by age, distance or circumstance — are learning from some of the world’s top scholars.

“Something revolutionary is happening,” said UC Berkeley professor Richard Muller, whose Physics for Future Presidents class airs on iTunes. “A large number of people around the world want more education. They thirst for understanding and knowledge.” One e-mail Muller received came with the subject line “Thank you from a grateful sailor in Iraq.”

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The courses on iTunes U may not be the stuff of Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40.” But they are ranked nonetheless, and some become surprise download hits. One recent week, popular iTunes U podcasts included Modern Theoretical Physics from Stanford, Elementary Greek from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and Intro to Biology from MIT.

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You see what I am saying the information is there, the means of accessing it is there, all we need now is the Biological Processing Unit that can put the two together. We may never end up with another Einstein or Thomas Jefferson, but we might end up with the Islamic equivalent of Martin Luther or the Chinese equivalent of Thomas Paine. If that happens it will be big, really big, bigger than fast downloads of internet porn even.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 8:57 pm by Chad and is filed under Big Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.