As the new iPhone starts landing in customers’ lucky hands, everyone is making the connection between Siri and the 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept. It’s the stuff of science fiction, teasing us with the possibility that we could create a world smart enough to understand our needs. I can’t begin to express how delightful it is to watch technology catch up to our dreams, one step at a time: we now live on the Starship Enterprise.

Kyle Baxter calls Siri the future of the web, and I’m pretty sure he’s right. Rather than teaching ourselves to think like a computer, we’re beginning to teach the computer to respond to the way we think. Making information easily available from recognized sources¹ and returning definitive answers democratizes knowledge in a whole new way.