Prediction: Could the Cloud Expand Human Brain Capacity?

Grazed from HotHardware. Author: Seth Colaner.

You have to love the ideas that spill forth from a good futurist such as Ray Kurzweil, who recently remarked at an event that the cloud is potentially capable of expanding human brain capacity. The “cloud” is a computing revolution (or evolution, or devolution, depending on who you ask) wherein data, programs, and more are decentralized from the machine sitting in front of you to a data farm at some remote location where everything is served up to users and accessed over the Internet. Or put another way, the cloud stores data–all of the data, really–which people can easily access with a computing device and an Internet connection.

Metaphorically, our brainpower has already been immensely expanded by the paradigm of remotely stored data that is easily accessible. Just take the search engine as an example; before the ability to search the Internet and it’s deep wealth of knowledge, the simplest bits of information were frustratingly elusive…

What to know the George Washington’s middle name, or can’t remember the specifics of the molecular structure of an element, or need to check on the best way to make a surgical incision of a certain kind, or are curious about how tall Jon Hamm is? Today, you can get the answers to those questions in seconds; 15 years ago, you needed to thumb through the family encyclopedias or head over to the library and dig–and that’s assuming the information was actually available. In a sense, the search engine has changed the way we learn and access information; instead of reading something and committing it to memory, it’s nearly as effective to simply learn the fastest way to access that information and preserve your brain’s capacity for something else…

Read more from the source @ http://hothardware.com/News/Prediction-Could-the-Cloud-Expand-Human-Brain-Capacity/