Abstract

In ancient times, at great effort over the span of many years, people learned to do arithmetic, to read, to write, and to measure reality with rulers and eventually clocks. A person who cannot handle any of these cognitive tools is a very different creature from somebody who can. The changes happening now will be at least as significant, and will occur much faster, probably within a single human lifetime. This article will consider cutting-edge research being done today, and extrapolate its implications some distance into the future. One theme of this survey is that very humble information technology applications could have a cumulative effect that is extremely dramatic, all the more stunning because we ourselves will be involved every step of the way