My wife and I were watching a rerun of Law and Order and a pretty actress playing a minor role suddenly looked familiar to me. I couldn't remember her name or what I'd seen her in before, and neither could my wife. We brought up the episode title on the data subscreen, and I googled it, looked up her character's name and quickly cross-referenced to her bio and photos. All in less than a minute.

It really doesn't matter who she was, but it occurred to me during this exercise that we now have instant, total recall: access to all human knowledge and history at our fingertips. The computer, the web, and search engines now make looking something up a trivial exercise. And with satellites, cell phones and email, we can communicate almost as effortlessly as we can access the species database.

Sure, wiki and google are only a quick index, an abridged card catalogue; data, not information, and certainly not knowledge or wisdom. This is no substitute for study, or education or disciplined thought. In fact, it is so easy to mistake quick access for true understanding. But even conceding this, we now have an enormous power at our command, one that would have made the scholars of even a few years ago reel in disbelief if they had been told that it would be available to the common man.

This has happened so fast, and so quickly become second nature to us that we fail to really comprehend how marvelous it is--and many young people today have never known a world where this was not possible. I find that totally staggering, the only thing that remotely compares to it in human history is the invention of the alphabet, and later, printing from moveable type. But that took centuries.

Yes, it is marvelous, but it will have unforeseen consequences that will express themselves in unanticipated ways in how we think and act, both as individuals and as a civilization. As for myself, I am already scared at how quickly I have become totally dependant on this technology in everything I do. I am helpless without it.