Will Changes Brought About By Technology Make Life Better?

NPR had a very good presentation on this recently as well. You can read the transcript at:

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2011/06/17/06

I particularly enjoyed the experiment of having a number of different people google the same phrase and come up with completely different results, depending upon their past internet activities.

Something is very wrong with the current approach to "personalized" filtering, in that I never, ever find what I am looking for when I use Google or Bing. I have a couple of other search engines I use that work fine at finding the information I seek quite quickly.

I have also played around with an application called "StumbleUpon" which provides random links, supposedly based on my personal likes and dislikes. I do not understand why I get more and more dislikes than I do likes, as time goes on.

I know for a fact that the universe is not running out of things that interest me. But they seem to be harder and harder to find...

Whatever is "free" may well be worth the price. What if Google/Bing/etc. established a system where users could reward good information by a small sum of money? If people got on board with this, soon the quality of "hits" might go up....