The Internet is like the world acquiring a nervous system. Before the Internet, and particularly before the telegraph, telephone, and advanced telecommunications, communication was incredibly slow. It would have to go from one person literally to another. Maybe at best that person could carry a note from another person, but it's still literally person to person. Unless one person bumps into another person they are pretty much not going to communicate. You had to like basically physically connect with somebody to communicate, like a letter, like you would send letters... on paper.
People were sort of like isolated cells if you will, they would communicate information almost by osmosis relative to how the Internet works. With the Internet suddenly all the worlds information, all of humanity's knowledge is instantly available to any person. That is just like one cell in your body having access to all the information about the rest of your body. In the same way that when we just had multicellular creatures without nervous systems, they would just communicate via osmosis. Imagine a simple multi-cellular creature that would communicate via quite slow chemical signals, there was really no way that one cell had access to the collective consciousness. Now if you have a nervous system any part of the human collective can know about any other part instantly. I think it has literally gone from a situation where people would communicate almost like via osmosis, to any part of humanity knows what every other part of humanity is immediately, it's pretty incredible.
Humanity is effectively becoming a super organism and qualitatively different than what it had been before. I think we have effectively created a kind of a super organism. It is evolution on a new plane. It's really quite a remarkable transformation. In the past, if you wanted access to a lot of information you had to go to libraries here and there, and you would have to talk to people, you had to be near to a big library or something - like the great Bodleian library - but that would be the only way to gain access to information. Unless you were physically where the books were, you didn't have access to the information. Now with the Internet, with everything online, you can be somewhere in the jungles of South America and if you've got access to an Internet connection, you've got access to essentially all the world's information, with a tremendous amount of analytical power behind that. It's some sort of ‘human machine collective intelligence.’ With everything digitized you can be anywhere with an Internet connection and have access to the accumulative knowledge of humanity. You have access to more information than the Library of Congress through your iPhone.
Having a super computer in your pocket is something that people would not have predicted. You have basically superpowers with your computer, and your phone, and the applications that are there. You have more power than the President of the United States had 20 years ago. You can answer any question, you can video conference anywhere with anyone, you can send a message to millions of people instantly.
I do think that the Internet is a great equalizer of access to information. Access to information is incredible, anyone with $100 device has access to all the worlds information. Which is an incredible thing. This is maybe not talked about as much as it should be but you can learn anything if you have a $100 Internet device. You can just learn anything. Which is amazing compared to the past. You don't need to have access to a library. In principle you can just learn everything you want for free really. I think that is a pretty great part of the future we are in right now.