Comment by wnkrshm

Imagine how much further along libraries could be if they had big research and development budgets - you could use all the NLP, image processing and robotics in the world to catalogue, digitize, sort and backup every hardcopy in existence. And then there is digital media.

If we want to go into a TNG Star Trek future, taking the media and knowledge from those walled gardens and making them accessible and searchable should be a priority for what we would like to call civilization.

Instead, we have multiple digital circuses that happen to contain knowledge, just by grace of providing a way for people to host and discover media.