Last night, as I sat, motionless from the thumbs down, thrashing buttons on a popular video game controller and fantasising that I may have in fact been raised by ninjas, I was blindsided by an odd thought.

Given the ever-increasing amount of people on this planet, and the staggeringly large amount of ideas that just one person can generate, just how many of these viewpoints or theories are truly original?

Surely even those ridiculously obscure thoughts that we have regarding fairy penguins, digging your way to China or where the miniaturisation of technology is ultimately leading us have all been thought of by someone else.
Has the capacity for originality of the human brain finally been reached due to the exponential increase in knowledge-sharing, and this thing we call the 'Interweb'?.

In short, is it actually possible that everything we think has already been thought?.

To add weight to this theory, look at the predictions of such sci-fi luminaries as Heinlein, Dick or Asimov; all exponents of ideas born way before the inception of cyberpunk and society's subsequent predilection for all things Matrix.

In his book, "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep", Dick describes how families are allocated androids (or "andys"), as an incentive to move to off-world colonies in an effort to preserve the human race. The futuristic (and at the time, frighteningly original), idea of every family owning a robot is something that, in today's technological culture, even infants take for granted.
We now live in a world of robot dogs, vacuum cleaners with a disturbingly high level of Artificial Intelligence, and children's toys that can beat us at chess without breaking a virtual sweat.

So where to from here?

Will the Interweb somehow spawn a neatly packaged and PDF'ed version of mass consciousness? Will the overwhelming desire to think decrease until Google replaces an individuals identity?
It appears it may have started already. Hikikomori is becoming a more prevalent issue in Japan than ever before, and a casual search will also show that essentially the same phenomenon is also found in the US, Australia, Canada and Britain.

Oh, and just to add a little icing on the proverbial cake, I Googled this very topic and got over 17,000 responses.

Does this make me an iconoclast? I hope not.