While Google and Wikipedia serve as the steam engines of today, the full potential of this Information Age is yet to unfold. I envision a future civilization characterized by four pillars that will make the world work as a single mind.
Pillar One: Data Connectivity
As long as we have a person's email address or a resource's address (such as a website's URL), we can approach this person or resource. Such a capability is dubbed "data connectivity" in this article. Data connectivity is omnipresent, with the exception that it is still restricted in certain countries and regions, where efforts are committed on all levels to mitigate the interferences.
Pillar Two: Language Connectivity
Data connectivity alone is not enough. If we can't decode a foreign language, we're unable to access valuable information and opportunities available in that language. How to technically break the language barrier is a major question for computer scientists and linguists. The problem can be further divided into two subproblems: (1) Can people learn a foreign language more efficiently and effortlessly? L1-driven L2 teaching (L1DL2T), among other ideas presented in my free ebook BLBGCA, will provably be the answer to this question. (2) Can people understand and generate information in a foreign language, almost without learning that language? The "generating" part can be realized by writing in a so-called formal language and having it machine-translated; the "understanding" part can be addressed by a new paradigm of machine translation called syntax-preserving machine translation (SPMT), where the user is taught syntactic knowledge of the world's major languages so that he can directly understand syntax in a foreign language text while content words are translated to his native language by the computer. Read my free ebook BLBGCA for details.
Pillar Three: Knowledge Connectivity
The famous Babel Tower story tells that God split the humankind's single language into many and scattered them throughout the earth. In fact, language is hardly the only thing that is diversified and scattered around the world. Many a time I came up with a bright idea and tried to search Google for prior statements of the same idea, only to no avail; but eventually a person on the Net referred me to a prior art, or I myself found one via much more diligent searches (i.e. trying new keyword combinations and checking more search results). Why couldn't I find a prior art with Google easily? Because the actual prior art I wound up with was described in terms different from what I tried, or the prior art was deeply buried in a search result far beyond the first few results pages.
A keyword-based information retrieval system like Google isn't ideal for locating an idea because the same idea can be written in a million different ways and it's almost impossible for Google or the searcher to try them all. So, does it mean we really can't take control of the storage and retrieval of "ideas"? No. We all have the experience of locating something in a book by following its "table of contents", which could have never been done by searching with a blindly guessed keyword combination. Indeed, "table of contents" (a tree where each node guides you to more specific topics) and its more general variant, "cross reference" (a network where each vertex guides you to related, not just more specific, topics), can harness a human's own brainpower to effectively serve his "idea management and retrieval" needs.
Fortunately, Wikipedia is exactly something that has categorization and cross reference that can index topics as specific as conceivable, and no two pages are dedicated to exactly the same topic. So, Wikipedia is knowledge connectivity!
Pillar Four: Intelligence Connectivity
Wikipedia indexes factual knowledge (e.g. 7th-grade geometry) but can't directly solve a problem for you. However, we can use a hypertext system like a wiki to implement a "problem base" that indexes every problem in a domain. While Wikipedia has a page for every concept, a "problem wiki" has a page for every "problem". The user can start from a very general "problem" page such as "Geometry" and recursively go down to more specific problems until one that is closest to his particular problem. Or he can follow links to related problems just like a Wikipedia user can follow links to related concepts. Once the user reaches a problem page that best matches his problem, he can view expert-written solutions to that problem on that page. On a problem page, there can even be links to "external resources" and "human experts" that may further help him with his problem solving.