Let's look at this world we live in, briefly.

I have one of the best encyclopedias in history at my fingertips. Not only is it free and translated into numerous languages it is also searchable and interlinked. If I want to read about Aaron Burr, or the Second Congo War, or spherical harmonics it takes a fraction of a second to bring up an article. And that's been my habit for the last several years, to look stuff up, to find out facts when curiosity strikes. No doubt many other people have developed the same habit, how has it changed the nature of the world?

Meanwhile, I can discuss topics of endless variety and depth with people from all over the world. I have personal friends who live all over the US and other countries. When a friend of mine went to Australia for business recently the biggest problem in keeping in touch was merely the time difference.

I can loan money to people all over the world through microfinance sites like kiva.org. I can directly support the advancement of the developing world in a very personal, very concrete way.

The internet makes direct support of artists and artisans not just practical but downright advantageous for most creators. Whether it's amazon or a personal webstore or etsy or kickstarter or indiegogo, I can find people whose work I enjoy and I can put money directly in their pockets with much less overhead and intervening red tape than has ever been possible before. And this has led to many artists and creators being able to live off of their work and spend more time on their work who would never have been able to before the internet.

In the next 2 or 3 decades something quite remarkable and unprecedented will happen in our world. Our world will become connected. All of it. Not just the 1-2 billion people who have access to the internet today. Everyone. The developing world, people living in backwater failed states, everyone. From the arid depths of Mali to the mountains of Tajikistan to the hustle and bustle of Mumbai to the slums of Manila, access to computers and to the internet will be nearly universal. This may seem unlikely from the perspective of today but it's right smack on the path of technology and economics, it's pretty much inevitable. This alone will lead to a significant inflection point in the development of the poorest parts of the world, likely accelerating development in ways we can't even imagine today. But it will also lead to a profound change in character of the world, in the information that people have available, etc.

And it will happen not because of the diligent work of NGOs or of UN special offices or of foreign aid. It will happen because things like twitter, facebook, google maps, and so forth created an overall smartphone landscape which was enticing enough to cause the wealthiest people in the world to spend considerable amounts of money buying smartphones. And in the process subsidizing the development of the core technology of the most easily mass-produced and most intuitive to use computing devices in history. Smartphones and tablets are just a handful of chips, a battery, and a screen, they have fewer components than any other computing device and each component is immanently vulnerable to amortization of fixed development and manufacturing costs. The chips and screens of today that go into a several hundred dollar device will over the next few years and decades drop by an order of magnitude or more in cost, putting such devices within the grasp of even the poorest people in the world.

And we are only now at the very earliest stages of this revolution in computing and its impact on the world. This is a monumental event on the scale of the invention of agriculture, it is a turning point in human civilization. And even though it is happening right in front of our eyes many people are incapable of noticing.