building a better exocortex

Ever since I read Charlie Stross' "Accelerando", I've been intrigued by the idea of the exocortex. He presents the idea (which I've met elsewhere, as well), that our cognitive processes are becoming ever-more-closely bound together with technology. I feel that I'm part of a transitional generation. My phone remembers my contacts for me, but I am, in fact, able to read a map on my own, and don't generally make use of Google's canned directions. I use Wikipedia to check up on dates if I can't recall them right away, but I personally remember a good deal of basic information. My students are more apt to rely entirely on technology to provide factual information and to handle certain basic tasks. I suspect that this is inevitable, but I do think that the process of integrating human intelligence and machine intelligence needs to be managed more carefully and thoughtfully than is currently the case.

I worry that we have become too reliant on the internet, and particularly on black-box search engines, to provide indexing for information about the world. If Google refuses to list a website, does that website really exist? If Google removed every reference to Alexander II, for some reason, most of my students would have no way of knowing that anything was amiss. Google isn't likely to delete Alexander II from the historical record, but Google and other search engines do actively manage the presentation of data. This is a point of some concern for me.

If it were feasible, I would gladly pay a reasonable amount of money to have access to a fully-transparent and customizable search engine. Search engines (as well as social networking sites) are so crucial in managing our digital lives that it seems very strange to me that we allow them to operate as ad-supported black boxes. This isn't exactly the same thing as having an outsourced and ad-supported corpus callosum, but it's not unrelated. Our connections to external information are critical for shaping our understanding of the world, and for determining how we lead our economic, social, and political lives. Google and Facebook currently make only crude use of their ability to steer our attention and shape our thought processes, but this will inevitably change, as newer tools and algorithms become ever-more-efficient in integrating the internet into our normal processes of cognition, and as transitional dinosaurs of Gen X and before become a smaller and smaller part of the population.

I'm hoping for a fee-for-use search engine sooner rather than later. DMOZ partially address this issue, and I'm intrigued by its crowd-sourced structure, but I'd still much prefer a fully-customizable engine that allowed me personally to intentionally prioritize or ignore certain websites or categories of information, and to manage the data structures used to organize and present information. As more and more of my cognitive processes are linked, in one way or another, to the internet, I'm more and more interested in the form, structure, and biases of the software that forms those linkages.