Ray Kurzweil estimates that by 2019, $1,000 will buy you the equivalent processing power of one human brain. Add that to this quote about the web of data from Alexander Korth on Read/Write Web today:

The idea of the Web of Data came about as a result of both this limitation and the existence of countless structured data sets distributed all over the world and containing all kinds of information. These data sets are the property of companies that trend to make them accessible. Typically, a data set contains knowledge about a particular domain, like books, music, encyclopedic data, companies, you name it. If these data sets were interconnected (i.e. link to each other like websites), a machine could traverse this independent web of noiseless, structured information to gather semantic knowledge of arbitrary entities and domains. The result would be a massive, freely accessible knowledge base forming the foundation of a new generation of applications and services.

I think these two ideas point to a real shift in the way we think about the internet. We have been thinking of the internet as media: media that is inherently in a particular form for presentation and reading by humans; media that is produced; media that cannot be picked apart from the form in which you see it. But more and more, the internet is becoming not media, but data; not irregular but highly structured. If you take the web of data along with the continuing exponential increases in processing power as well as trends like cloud computing and ubiquitous computing, what the internet becomes is essentially a vast brain for the entire human race. Knowledge, information, and data processing that individual people with limited access to data could not possibly formulate will be accessible through this aggregate brain. Its knowledge will seep into all of our everyday activities. We will begin (have already begun?) to take our access to this brain for granted. Some menial mental tasks like remembering facts (everything from multiplication tables to the address of that party tonight) will be offloaded to the brain of the internet. Does this make us more powerful as a species? Is it the next phase in our evolution — having maxed out the capacity to grow bigger brains in our heads, we create an external, communal brain? Or does it weaken us, making us utterly dependent on machines, technology, and data formats that are unreliable, hackable, and grow obsolete?