The Golden Age for Information?

There is, perhaps, a golden age for everything.  And many different people will think that their time (or more likely a past time) was a "Golden Age" for something.  For me, I think that we are currently living in a Golden Age because there is so much human knowledge available to you almost instantaneously.  And folks are still innovating to come up with ways of speeding it up even further.

I recently watched the Amazon Echo promotional video and I was struck with how useful that could be.  (My son made me immediately watch the parody video, which is admittedly a lot more fun).  Talking about it over dinner, both of my teenage son's thought that I'd be supremely lazy to buy one.  Their argument was that I already have a device (my iPhone) that will basically do the same thing.  I tried a few of the same examples from the Amazon ad and was disappointed with the Siri results.  They just rolled their eyes and said why wouldn't you just type it into your computer.

Friction.  Forcing yourself to the computer to ask a question or to take a note doesn't work all of the time.  There will just be things that you don't take a note about.  Or things for which you don't ask the question, even though it would have been nice to have an answer just then.  Perhaps Amazon Echo could read you the next step in the recipe?  The timer function would definitely help.

I have a bunch of z-wave controllable light switches around my house installed to work with a Mi Casa Verde device.  It stopped working and I've been looking into replacing it.  I could just replace it with a Vera 3 or a Vera Lite controller.  That said, I don't like the idea that I paid $200 or so and it works for 3 or 4 years and then just poops out.  (But perhaps that is the state of all electronics these days?)

In my attempt to find a replacement, I've wondered how possible / fun that it might be to create a controller on my own (or at least partially on my own).  I'm a reasonably tech savvy person and can code reasonably well.  I've thought that the Raspberry Pi was a very cool platform to build on.  With a simple Google search, I ran across the Razberry daughter card.  The Razberry includes all of the hardware and low-level software to control a Z-wave network.  And from some review of their site, there appears to be enough information for me to learn how to program my own profile.

Amazing.  I can just decide to do an incredibly complex electronics project because I can find sufficient and freely available information on the Internet.  I have a means to ask questions (forums) and learn from questions others have asked before me.  Worst case, I can buy books (without leaving my house) to go in depth on a particular topic.

Golden Age for information and ease of access to it.  At least that is what it feels like to me now.  Will the next 10 or 20 years get even better?  Have we reached a limit to how free information can get?  Or will I laugh when I look back on the state of information availability of 2014?

Ways in which it could get much better:

• More information available.  Generally, just an expansion of human knowledge.
• Better searching on the internet.
• More open source and open source-like projects.
• Easier interfaces for relative noobs like me to get started on electronics projects.

Ways in which it could get worse:

• Copyright insanity
• Paywalls
• Collapse of civilization

My bet is that it gets better.  Much better.  I can't wait!