Courtesy of Heritage Galleries & Auctioneers, Dallas, Texas.

By Jim Halperin

Pre-Gutenberg, it must have been pretty difficult to learn much about coins. No one alive at the beginning of the Second Millennium could share their research beyond a close circle of friends. No doubt even the top collectors couldn't agree which coins were rare, much less how to grade them. They didn't call it the Dark Ages for nothing.
But until recently, we boomers didn't have it so easy either. If I close my eyes and calm my overloaded mind, I can still recall the olden days, seven long years ago, when we had to look things up in books. Today, of course, you boot up, dial in, and search. Or if you're really slothful, you pay one of those expert sites like Keen.com and someone else will do your research for you.

Unnecessary drudgery, I say! At HeritageCoin.com, we already make it even easier by giving you all the information we have (zoom images, populations, third-party pricing guides, previous auction records, etc.) right next to every coin we offer through our web auctions. You never have to leave our site. In fact, our goal is to make outside research completely superfluous. But soon the cutting-edge technology we offer today will seem primitive indeed.

Consider the coming ubiquitous mobile-wireless Internet that you never have to turn on because it's always connected. By 2020, and possibly much sooner, you'll be carrying it with you wherever you go; on your clothes, in your wristwatch, on the lenses of your glasses, maybe implanted in your body. Imagine never having to type anything - tell it what you want, or even just think it, and software about a million times more powerful than Windows 2000 finds the information for you instantly and places it before your eyes in just the right format. Want to know how Voce Populi halfpennies were made? Your personal info-bot will instantly sift through every published article in the digital universe, and provide the most relevant information it has relative to that scarce colonial's manufacture, as well as the sources of such information. Through reverse links, your bot can also access and provide peer-review data that show how credible each contributing author (human or otherwise) is deemed by his, her or its fellow experts.

Still, that leaves far too much work!

After all, when researching anything having to do with the past, you'll still have to use some imagination and logic to understand the nuances of how things were, much as my parents and grandparents, before television's ubiquity, once relied on radio serials for entertainment. Worse yet, you'll have to decide the extent that each expert system (i.e., neural net and artificial intelligence software) and each human expert is providing mere theories versus proven facts.

That is, until the next wave of technology breaks upon these shores.

By 2030, a movie-like recreation of the most likely scenario, created through fuzzy logic forensics, hypothesis-testing simulations, and other advanced data-crunching protocols, by machines a billion times more complex than any computer that exists today, will simply project onto your contact lenses, or perhaps directly into your optic nerve or even the visual cortex of your brain, with sound and smell added through audile and olfactory implants. Every known fact, every expert theory and opinion, every piece of neural syllogism known or deducible, will have already been thrown into the mix. You'll simply lean back and experience Roche's Mint at King Street in Dublin, perhaps not exactly as it was in 1760, but as close as the sum of human and technological discovery can get you to it.

Hallelujah! At last, you won't have to think at all.

As eerie as such a scenario may sound, I do very much look forward to most advances in technology. Progress in medicine, political philosophy, and human psychopathology may eventually relieve the seemingly intractable problems of illness, poverty and war. Furthermore, it seems to me that some of us will always feel compelled to dig deeper, to contribute our own theories, to add to the vast and ever-growing pool of knowledge. Optimist that I am, I believe that many humans will continue to use their minds, even as it becomes exponentially more optional to do so.

Copyright 2000, published by permission from the August 14 issue of Coin World.