From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Apr 11 2000 - 21:26:17 MDT
Adrian Tymes wrote:
>
> Education, and the mental - as opposed to physical - ability to obtain
> new information as it becomes available and desirable, will probably be
> one of the determining differences. Quite likely, anyone who wishes to
> do so and knows how to will be able to log on from their home or nearest
> public access terminal to find answers to the pressing questions of the
> moment, in degrees of seriousness ranging from the humor behind a
> friend's light jest regarding something one is not quite familiar with,
> to the user-created manual on a tool one is using, to auto-generated
> (and, one would hope, accurate) lists of customers for whatever creative
> effort one has been inspired to do, to various media embodiments of
> answers to "how do I do that". The main reason the have nots will not
> be enriching themselves this way, is that they will not know or not
> think to apply that to their problems.
This is already happening. People in my family - even my extended
family - ask me to search the 'Net on topics ranging from MP3 to MRI.
Apparently I can type in a set of search terms and get the desired page
returned as the first result, while others, typing in exactly the same
search terms, get 14,328 results, of which the desired page is result
14,305. Presumably this is just magic, like females being able to find
objects ranging from ketchup to complete four-course meals in
exhaustively male-searched refrigerators.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Member, Extropy Institute
Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
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