Suppose, for the sake of argument, the technology were one day perfected that could give anyone instant access to all of the world’s knowledge? Perhaps it would be in the form a a direct brain link, combined with an A.I. driven search engine. As soon as you think about a topic, you immediately find that you have access to all of the facts pertaining to that topic.
We can sort of do this now, only not instantaneously, and only after expending a certain measure of effort. If you are talking to someone on the phone, and you have Google open before you, you can do a pretty good job of gathering facts pertaining to your conversation while the conversation is still going on.
But having that information available without needing to search for it might be a game changer. You wouldn’t be distracted by the need to continually switch your focus between conversation and search. Instead you and your conversant could both simply remain in the flow of the discussion.
I suspect that this sort of capability might change a lot of things. Literature, medicine, finance, personal relationships and many other realms of human discourse might well become transformed, just as these were all transformed by the advent of the Web and the smartphone.
But what exactly would be the nature of these transformations? It might be fun to try to figure that out.