Eventually, as wearables replace SmartPhones, we will develop new ways of looking things up. We will use some combination of voice, gaze and gesture to quickly and unobtrusively summon up any factoid or other item of interest.
Children who are born into the coming era of wearables won’t even think about this — they will simply do it intuitively. To those of us hold-overs from the pre-wearable era, the facility with which our children are able to look things up may seem miraculous.
Within a generation, it will be taken for granted that we can all unobtrusively summon up any knowledge while holding a conversation, without interrupting the flow of that conversation. The entire concept of not having knowledge at your fingertips will have gone the way of the dodo bird and the steam engine.
What effect will this have on society? Will we be better for it because we will all have more immediate access to vast amounts of knowledge? Or will we be worse off, because nobody will know what it means to put in thought and care to acquire that knowledge?