Great writing Zygar, I think you chart the social, cultural, and technological development of information abundance (or infobesity) very well. Not only that, but you propose a very good solution to this information abundance and contextualize this with the analogous previous development of the printing press. The only thing I would add is that this information overload also fundamentally challenges the biological capacity of the human brain. No technological tool outside of the human body can solve the information abundance that will occur over the next 20, 30, 40 years. Also, welcome to hubski.
Thank you! It will be interesting to see what this future looks like. I suspect much of the non-biological augmentation will happen at an almost unconscious level; in the same way that our brain magically turns a series of upside down saccades into a continuous feed of the world around us. Right now we perceive a screen full of pixels as a single image, what will it be like when our brain perceives a whole field of knowledge as a single coherent entity?