The network IS the machine but how do we use it?

Nature magazine posted an interesting commentary by Vernor Vinge yesterday. For anybody interested in technology and its applications, this little piece does not have too much new to offer, it stands more as a marker which says "yep, we're on the way to something really cool, the on-demand and hyper-aware future." I did, however, really appreciate the last paragraph:

How can we prepare for such a future? Perhaps that is the most important research project for our creativity machine. We need to exploit the growing sensor/effector layer to make the world itself a real-time database. In the social, human layers of the Internet, we need to devise and experiment with large-scale architectures for collaboration. We need linguists and artificial-intelligence researchers to extend the capabilities of search engines and social networks to produce services that can bridge barriers created by technical jargon and forge links between unrelated specialties, bringing research groups with complementary problems and solutions together — even when those groups have not noticed the possibility of collaboration. In the end, computers plus networks plus people add up to something significantly greater than the parts. The ensemble eventually grows beyond human creativity. To become what? We can't know until we get there.

This got me thinking about the professional developers of the future and the skill-set that they'll need to have to get their jobs done. Developers are becoming people who do less coding and more "mashing-up" of existing services. This is merely one indicator of a very real phenomenon, a growing class of workers whose whole job is to know how to derive answers from the internet. It's like Case in "Neuromancer", a hired gun who solves issues for major corporations by being incredibly adept at navigating massive amounts of information.

This group of internet workers already exists and it's growing quickly. Several of the recruiters I worked with at Amazon, in their hiring session, were given some job requirements for a fictitious position and then asked to find the best candidate that they could off the web while the interviewer watched. Talk about intimidating! Anyways, I just like the idea that at some time in the future, the fact that I spend 9 billion hours per day online might actually come in useful. I'm learning to use the "magical answer machine, man!"