Inhuman Agency Insufficient

It seems that in the short-to-mid-term future, information--on everything from the trivial to the global--will be easily accessible, and in staggering quantities. From one perspective we are already at that point, but I believe that in the near future, more and more information will be meaningfully metatagged, allowing more meaningful results than today's simple web searches (how and if we get to that point is another discussion entirely, the realization of which will be largely taken for granted here).

The question is what will become of all this information. I'm thinking more broadly than just information presentation at the HCI or cognitive psychology level; but what ways can vast amounts of data be sifted on demand to create powerful results, in an intuitive form? The important difference is between already existing tools for specialized and power users, and tools for the average user. The 'digital divide' of the future won't be between those who do and don't have simple access to the internet--the meaningful difference will be between those who have the ability to *use* the staggering quantities of information (already) available to them, and those who are simply 'surfing' the net.

I would argue that this has always been the case, from the beginning; access to IM and email admittedly makes available new habits and lifestyles; but the simply communicative applications of the present--meaningful as they are--are already becoming a social commodity. The next step will be to allow the individual to make the world (the world's data) work for them in ways that are comfortable: social, intuitive, responsive ways. At the heart of this notion is the idea that 'smart' or 'intelligent' or 'agent' systems of the future (at least the mid-term future) will not be able to deliver their much-speculated benefits entirely on their own. Problems concerning human agency, context, and classification may not ever be entirely automated. Thus the person who understands the conceptual background and organization of the world's information will always have an (increasingly larger?) advantage--socially, economically--over the person who is at the mercy of such systems' recommendation.

The question to be considered: can incisive (social and technical) understanding combine with good design to create power-user tools for everyone? To what degree can "knowledge in the world" compensate for the expert's understanding, of both subject background and technical mastery?