I've seen a couple of things recently that have suggested that the "internet revolution" is over. That 2.0 has been with us for long enough now that we all know what to do – it's now just a matter of getting on with it.
For me, this just doesn't ring true. As the connectedness of our world increases exponentially, so do the questions around what this could mean. The reality, is that we still know very little about how a hyper-connected world really works. In the same way, as the amount of available information grows exponentially, our knowledge also grows, but we still know so little about the world (and the universe) in which we live.
The simple truth is that every question we answer leads to more questions. As usual, the exceedingly bright Kevin Kelly has summed up this phenomenon far better than I can over here:
"…even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are
expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you,
the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an
exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our
ignorance, and it is growing exponentially. In other words, science is
a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge…we have not yet reached our maximum ignorance."
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