The very first attempts at sharing this knowledge beyond the few individuals who were there to witness the discovery came in the form of spoken language, a discovery that is almost entirely unique to humans. This is what enabled the collective knowledge of society to increase faster than instincts could evolve. This point, somewhere between ~500,000 years ago and ~20,000 years ago, is what I define as Phase 1.
Phase 2 is the development of written language, which allows knowledge to be stored in a permanent form outside the imperfect human brain. This paradigm shift is thought to have occurred between ~10,000 and ~5,000 years ago.
The development of the Internet in the 1960s and 1970s was the third major shift in humanity's ability to share knowledge: for the first time any individual could have his or her discovery shared around the world in seconds. The invention of the Web in 1991 certainly made this much easier for the average person, but doesn't count as a groundbreaking change.
And then we come to Wikipedia, a system designed from the ground up to be a repository for shared human knowledge. It has grown to the point that nobody can expect to hold more than one percent of it or so in their heads at once—and even one percent is still 30,000 separate topics. The sheer ease of contributing to Wikipedia and the even greater ease of simply using it make it the first place that millions of people go to satisfy their thirst for knowledge. I believe it is plausible to say that, better than anything else, Wikipedia represents the greatest achievement yet of human ingenuity, creativity, and innate desire for knowledge. I am not alone: the following is a transcript of a call received by the offices of the Wikimedia Foundation one Christmas:
hi this isn't exactly press or media inquiries but i couldn't think of another number to press so i pressed yoursI'll leave you with one more thing: the time between phases has decreased exponentially each time: a quick calculation predicts that the fifth paradigm shift will occur within the next few years at the very latest—in fact it may already be here, just waiting for a few years of improvement while it catches up to the current state of human knowledge...
i'm calling from uh madrid in spain and um on this christmas eve
i'm uh not much of a, a believer in christmas and i'm uh not into the christmas thing
but i am into the wikipedia thing and i have been ever since i discovered it two or three years ago and i i just wanted you guys to know that um that i'm very grateful for wikipedia
and uh that i think it's probably the greatest thing that's happened in my 44 years of life and that i donate um as i only do to the red cross um and [unintelligible]
causes that i believe in i guess um humanitarian causes and uh to me you you are a humanitarian cause
and i would like you if you could whoever you might be to extend my my my congratulations and my gratitude to your your colleagues
at the wikimedia foundation um cause uh you really really are the greatest thing [laughs]
that i can imagine and um um after god if there is one and [unintelligible] have no evidence as to his existence or her existence as i do to your own
so so thank you again from a user out here in spain, madrid, and um many thanks indeed
merry christmas if there is such a thing and um certainly many happy new years in your world and um i will keep contributing
thank you thank you thank you and goodnight
One possibility is that this fifth phase is tools such as Wolfram Alpha which are able to combine disparate data sources in a way that can itself make new discoveries—automating the knowledge acquisition process.
But more likely, it's something none of us will have anticipated, something that makes us turn around and say "why didn't I think of that?".
