If the American futurist R. Buckminster Fuller was right, as he always was, then the boundaries of human knowledge are forever expanding. In 1982, Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve” which showed that up until the year 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of the Second World War, this was every 25 years. Now, it is doubling annually.

How can humans possibly keep up with all this new information? How can we make sense of the world if the volume of data exceeds our ability to process it? Humanity is drowning in an ever-widening galaxy of ...