These Are Tough Days For 'Know-It-All's'

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In Greek and Roman times an educated person was expected to know almost everything there was to know.  This was a realistic expectation because almost every idea that had been committed to writing could be housed in a modest library.  Plato and Aristotle planned to create a single document that summarized all the important things then known.

It was not until the end of the 18th century that people thought it would be impossible to summarize all knowledge.

With over 100 thousand new books, and many times more than that in articles and papers, published every year, it is a race against time to comprehend only a sub-discipline in one life time.  Even the Library of Congress has stopped trying to keep up with all that is available.

It is estimated that the total sum of human knowledge now doubles every four or five years.  Our best practical hope of finding information about a particular area of knowledge is in the astonishing ability of computers to quickly access the World Wide Web.

The exponential growth in what is known must lead eventually to a point where the growth curve becomes essentially vertical and the old ways of finding things out break down.  Maybe then we'll use artificial intelligence and programmed agents to summarize information for a particular purpose.