It's hardly new; people had commonplace books in the 1600's.
I think QS is probably more popular in communities like hacker news because there are a lot of people here that understand:
1. Computers think faster than you
2. Computers remember more than you
3. You can use the above to solve interesting problems.
Combine that with pervasive computing/surveillance and you enable yourself to remember arbitrary amounts of things and mine insights from them.
Empirically, it's probably a young person's thing, because people tend towards conservatism with age, and the technology required is going to be something young people are more comfortable with. But there are plenty of older people involved in QS.
Not really. I'd be impressed with a robot that could do bipedal gate (for example) as well as humans do, but the problem is lack of computing power. A human doing mental arithmetic is not at all representative of what and how much the brain actually does during the act.
I think QS is probably more popular in communities like hacker news because there are a lot of people here that understand:
1. Computers think faster than you 2. Computers remember more than you 3. You can use the above to solve interesting problems.
Combine that with pervasive computing/surveillance and you enable yourself to remember arbitrary amounts of things and mine insights from them.
Empirically, it's probably a young person's thing, because people tend towards conservatism with age, and the technology required is going to be something young people are more comfortable with. But there are plenty of older people involved in QS.