Grocery stores are strangling the food industry. Car dealerships are strangling the auto industry. Local storage is strangling the cloud industry. Pencils and paper are the downfall of Evernote.

Balderdash.

First, universities exist to further our knowledge in esoteric fields regardless of their utility. If we need anything more, it is high level study in philosophy. Just because you can't immediately get a lucrative job in it, shouldn't keep our best and brightest from studying it and furthering our understanding of it. J. Mortimier Adler was sounding this message out in the 1950's when he started selling the Great Books of the Western World. We need far more non-utilitarian study. By your account, we should never do any pure science - and we are headed there.
Second, universities do a CRAP job of vocational training. It is not worth the incredible load of debt for the sake of a job. I have had much better success hiring 17 year olds who have spent their whole childhood programming with Google than anyone I've ever tried to work with who has a computer science degree. Interest + freely available knowledge trumps college every time.
It has become the default expectation that every. single. kid. out of high school should go to college, the debt load they will incur be damned. There are upper limits to that notion and we are reaching them. The internet is going to destroy the university system as we know it anyway - things like Khan Academy and the huge array of other self-teaching tools that are constantly springing up will have the power to make us vocational experts for nothing more than the cost of a tablet and an internet connection. The extremely high cost of college, combined with its vocational uselessness, combined with the proliferation of quality free teaching and knowledge online, are converging together to spell the doom of the American university. You can squawk all you want about the unreliability of wikipedia vs. a university class in something, but free plus good-enough vs. crazy-expensive is going to reward the former. It is inevitable.

Of course my "pod" does most if not all of these things, and more, on demand. It also tracks the miles I walk, allows me to audio or video conference with the other people who also have a similar "pod", tells me where to find gasoline or coffee, and allows me read a book or check my email. It even has a dandy feature whereby I can look up the world-sum knowledge of everything on virtually any subject. Perhaps you've heard of these strange devices that are becoming so popular? I find it handy to have one in hand!

You actually named the glaring problem. Smartphones and tablets and such don't use open standards to share data, they are apps that are not searchable, not based on standards, and can only be built by someone who knows objective C or whatever. The threat is that tablets and smartphones are going to so deeply undercut the PC market that virtually everyone moves to using proprietary apps in walled gardens, and the web itself shrinks to almost nothing. Then the "medium" becomes the domain of elite programmers and the data becomes wholly owned by the app owners. The web is important because it is open AND widely used. If it is no longer widely used then it isn't as useful.

This little meme is gathering a lot of momentum; I read an article in Time along the same lines last night.

A. If you work smart, you don't have to work long. It is actually important to say no to working 24/7, because you can't work long AND smart AND hard. Workign smart trumps it all. Good systems don't need long hours because they are stable. Good project plans adapt and require little of the usual rush at the last moment.
B. Connectedness through gadgets is a good thing, and there is no reason to be obligated to maintain this connectedness beyond what you desire.

Except the fundamentalist protestant wackjobs understand that they hold an irrational faith, whereas singularity believers try to pass their wackjob beliefs off as rational science. I think it is always an important question to ask - 'what kind of wackjob am I, how am I justifying it?' Everyone has some kind of wack job going on, if you're lucky it goes beyond porn.

I'm not sure Steve made a good enough case for this.

Thank you, I'll be here all week....

That sounds great! I would love to see every child with their own flying pony. Use an abstraction layer.

Didn't the artists CHOOSE to make these arrangements? If they had a hope in hell of making money on their own selling their recording on the internet without their stuff getting stolen, don't you think they would? So you are some kind of moralizing god that can tell the Artists how to run their affairs? if the money is going through a 3rd party, then it is OK to steal it, but if it goes directly to the Artist, better to pay them? I bet most people check carefully to see where their money would go before they decide to steal content, right? Let's look at a quote from a REAL artist, the fabulous guitarist Andy McKee, posting on piratebay: âoeYeah thanks a lot for uploading! It's not like I need to make a living with my music or anything. 8,676 thieves. If you really appreciate what I am doing, buy my CD legitimately so I can continue to compose music rather than work at K-Mart. I'm not Metallica. I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars, much less millions.â So even though he is signed with Candyrat, it sounds a little like he would prefer that you BUY his music, doesn't it? Have you ever tried to make a living by driving around the country doing shows? It is, after a short time, soul sucking and demeaning. But that is the only way even a great artist with fairly broad appeal can make a living in this day and age, because of morons like you.

Wish I had some mod points. Great post, right on. The bias on here is absolutely amazing. Thanks.

We are using mediawiki for this; it seems to work great, eventually someone catches stuff that has gotten outdated, and it is pretty easy to edit and track changes. The real problem is that search in mediawiki is just dreadful; the index they use is weird, word highlighting is weird, and search is very important for this kind of application of a wiki. So we have some pressure to move to something else. Personally, I'm looking for a wiki with decent search. Wikis are the perfect medium for internal documentation, you need everyone involved to braindump all the time, and it needs to be editable by others. In other words, it needs to be admin-free and grow organically.

I work in IT in healthcare. We are electronically recording our medical information - now. Many of those we work with are not. We have a huge and overwhelming workload just setting up and maintaining interchanges between all of the internal and external systems and databases we are using. The paper records we have need to be digitized, but they would only be images, the work and expense involved in REALLY digitizing them meaningfully would be completely overwhelming. Scanning the paper documents has not been an urgent issue - until last week! Our archive actually got flooded and we lost a good number of documents. Now that it is a disaster, management wants to retroactively listen to us that digitizing these documents is important. So, the whole issue is much more complex than simply saying 'Hey - let's digitize our medical records!' There is a whole history and environment and corporate culture that resists this. I think everyone is so overwhelmed with bandwidth overload all the time that only mandates and disasters can really produce the animus for change.