The Omniscient Self

Reading this month's National Geographic, in the section named "The big idea, augmented reality", I felt overwhelmed by the idea that a smart phone could tell you tons of information about anything on the street which you just passed by. The example in the article surpassed my imagination. "Point your phone onto sky" and find the constellation on your LCD monitor. I could almost imagine a contact lens company transplant this idea to their product and, there you go, a smart contact lens.
Another unpredictable consequence of the immediate information explosion is the power of knowledge people acquire from these technologies. If everyone could know the price of a mansion immediately after seeing it, how would a housing market react to that? If you can look at the facebook account of every single passersby, where are the rights of privacy? If you can tell the technical name of every kind of flora in the wild, the what are the uses of botany classes? In a way, people could become knowing-everything with this kind of technology, and what effect this would bring to the society in terms of class confrontation and democracy is still unknown. I personally do not enjoy the jargon saying the advance in high tech gadget should be regulated..blah blah blah.. nevertheless, it is still kind of scary when pieces of information about the world are in your immediate sight.