Foreshadowing of Information Democracy

In researching and writing an upcoming post, I came across this prescient quote from the President Emeritus of the University of Michigan, written in 1997:

“Who needs specialists in an age where intelligent software agents may soon be available to roam far and wide through robust networks containing the knowledge of the world, instantly and effortlessly extracting whatever a person wishes to know?” James J. Duderstadt, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks