Seth Godin
Of course, for millions
of years, people couldn't look it up. They couldn't read and they hadn't
invented writing yet, so there was nothing to look up.
All you knew was what
you knew, along with what you could ask someone about.
"Uncle Rock told me
that the bark from this tree will help a headache."
With writing came notes,
records and books. And with a great deal of training and effort, there were
things that you could look up. This is an unsung moment in human history,
because it allowed knowledge to begin to compile, and enabled all sorts of
longer-term transactions (including debt instruments).
In the mechanical age of
a hundred years ago, we got better and better at doing this at scale. Now there
were millions of books, and card catalogs. But looking up most things was time
consuming and often came up empty (as recently as twenty years ago, the only
way to find something in a book was via an index, which certainly gave hints,
but it lived only in the book itself).
The current era of
on-demand, widespread looking things up offers a whole new level of insight for
those that care enough to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, most people
don't.
Most organizations, most
leaders, most scientists, most doctors... hesitate to look it up. We're not
sure exactly what to look up, not sure of what we don't know, not sure of what
might be out there. It still takes talent and time to find the right thing in
the right place at the right time.
The next frontier is
already starting to happen. The system looks it up before we even realize it
needs looking up. The system tells us that this resume comes with an anti-social
online record attached to it. The system knows that these test results combined
with that medical history is worth a deeper look. The system knows that this
house was recently sold for a fraction of what's being asked...
All of us are smarter than
any of us, and when you throw in the us that came before, the opportunities
multiply.
But first, we need to
care enough to want to know.
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