That's a good quote. I've been trying to figure out what a programmable wiki would look like and I always end up with something that looks like a smalltalk VM.

I think it's possible to build a personal memex now. I'm looking at couchdb, lucene, apache tika, deno, and node.js as the initial set of tools to mash together and expose through the browser. CouchDB and Lucene will be used for persisence and searching along with Apache Tika for extracting metadata and doing OCR on images and PDFs. Deno and Node.js will be used for executing code on the server and the client. Deno can be used for sandboxing and exposing each person's knowledge base to programmatic control by other people like a federated search engine where people can share interesting code patterns for acting on knowledge bases and exposing hidden patterns.

Combine with some basic machine learning models and you get a pretty useful personal toolkit for knowledge enhancement.

Also, a quote by another good thinker

> Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. - Alfred North Whitehead