Consider this.
Currently I have web access from almost anywhere with my tablet (and Verizon EVDO), my cell phone (Sprint web), my work machine (wired) and my home machines (wireless network throughout the house).
When I am at one of these machines and I want to know something or someone says something that I don't understand, increasingly I look it up on Wikipedia or through Google. I am getting better and better at finding stuff, relatively quickly. But, I don't carry my tablet with me everywhere I go as it is still too large to make that practical.
I am attracted by the new mobile PC machine Microsoft has recently announced. It still seems too big for my purposes, but I can see that in the next year or two someone will develop an extremely portable (like the current one, also tablet-based) version of this that will be convenient enough to whip out at any time and any place.
Therefore, as these two trends converge I can see that I will increasingly have the ability to know almost anything I want to know at any time. There are lots of situations where I wish I had the ability to quickly have a little bit more background information on a particular subject or an introduction or quick refresher to a concept someone has referenced. I can see how this could be very useful for me, but also how it will change the world.
In his book An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds quoted William Gibson:
"The future has already arrived – it's just not evenly distributed."
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I'm writing this comment to stave off boredom at one of the ABA sessions I am attending in Tampa Bay, FL. A think I am experiencing "the future" as you describe it, surfing the net and cutting and pasting materials referenced by the speakers directly into my notes, often before they finish their long-winded sentences, along with hyperlinks to the sources, cross-references to other documents stored on my computer, etc. The guy next to me asked about Tablet PCs, so I clipped a reference to my favorite how-to book on the subject (Seize the Work Day) and emailed it to him right then and there, by way of a demonstration of how the Tablet works. The future is here, at least in my corner of the world!
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