From: John Brockman To: Jeff Bezos Geor Diamandis Jeffrey Epsteli Brewster Kahle Khosla Lori Pliego Simon , Stewart Brand Sergey Min Brooks Steve Case , Chris DiBona Richard Dawkins "Daniel C. Dennett" Peter John Doerr yson , Freeman Dyso son [email protected]>. Tony FadeII • , Bill Gates Timo Hannay < , Maja Hoffmann Bill Jo Joichi Ito Daniel Kahneman , Salar Kamangar , Evgeny Lebedev , Dave Morin athan Myhrvold Jean Pigozzi "J.E. Safra/Doumanian" , Eric Schmidt Jeff Skoll Yossi Vardi , Crai Venter Stephen Wolfram , Mark Zuckerberg Subject: Edge 322: W. Daniel Hillis: The Hillis Knowledge Web: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:05:42 +0000 Vinod Dean Kamen Marvin Minsky Elon Musk , Pierre Omid ar Pa. e • Nick Pritzker Ricardo Salinas , Charles Ronna Tanenbaum Evan Williams Edge 322 — July 19, 2010 20,500 words http://www.edge.org This online edition with streaming videois available at: http://www.edge.org/document&archive/edge322.html THE THIRD CULTURE THE HILLIS KNOWLEDGE WEB An Idea Whose Time Has Come W. Daniel Hillis In retrospect the key idea in the "Aristotle" essay was this: if humans could contribute their knowledge to a database that could be read by computers, then the computers could present that knowledge to humans in the time, place and format that would be most useful to them. The missing link to make the idea work was a universal database containing all human knowledge, represented in a form that could be accessed, filtered and interpreted by computers. One might reasonably ask: Why isn't that database the Wikipedia or even the World Wide Web? The answer is that these depositories of knowledge are designed to be read directly by humans, not interpreted by computers. EFTA00740586