Four Key Technological Threads

First is the "smart" environment, where every artifact you touch or are touched by - cars, houses, toilets, clothes, tools, toys, whatever - is endowed with its own intelligence. The special significance of this intelligence is that it increasingly includes the ability not only to aid humans to learn, but to actively participate in the process of learning itself.

Second is what my colleague George Gilder calls the "telecosm" - the growing broadband communications infrastructure that makes all knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. For both human and non-human learning, the telecosm makes the "best and brightest" available everywhere.

The third thread is a kit of "hypermedia" software tools needed to navigate through a knowledge-dense universe. In relation to multimedia, hypermedia is an expanded, multi-dimensional version of a book index. Hypermedia provides the technical bridge that leads the user away from informing and toward understanding.

The fourth and last thread in the matrix of HL technology is brain technology, a broad category representing the application of biology and other sciences to thinking and sensing systems. In a sense, brain tech is the "wild card" in the HL deck. It contributes much of the basic science and technical tools that underlie the other three areas of hyperlearning technology. But it also offers a growing potential for biotechnology that can alter the learning process from the inside out.