http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&q=sci-fi&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10

Is this old news? While looking for sci-fi news to talk about here, I searched for “sci-fi” at Google and got the above. It’s search results, except there’s a little live Twitter ticker that refreshes all mentions of sci-fi once every couple of seconds. If I remove any of the arguments, it doesn’t appear. I’m not even sure you’ll see it if you hit the link (what happens if you’re using IE and you request “client=firefox-a” ?).

Now imagine Google being able to live-refresh its own search index for all web pages, not just something unified and (relatively) small like Twitter. Are we close to that? Will humans need to know anything for themselves besides how to use these ubiquitous, mind-replacing tools? I don’t worry about knowing the capitol of Paraguay because I know Wikipedia will know it for me if I need it. So I don’t bother looking. I’m made uncurious because in a way, I know it — just in a more roundabout way than holding that datum in my brain.