DISQUS

Matthew -- I think you have a point. Even if the technology finds every correlation, we still need science to prove causality.

I started to write an increasingly long comment here after reading this, then went and stuck it at http://www.bitcurrent.com/does-big-search-chang... instead.

Besides, this way I got to post a Google LOLcat ad.

Thanks for getting me thinking!

Completely agree, Matthew. I was writing recently about the fact that many so-called SaaS companies are actually "cloud peripherals" like printing, faxing, scanning and storage. Reading this, it occurs to me that with the requirements for physical ports and keyboard gone, there's even less of a division between handheld Internet devices like an iPhone and a PC.

I will give Nick one point - Google shows you where in the text your search is, in 3-4 lines. You may lose important context if you only see those lines without the preceding text, which you'd still get from skimming.

But I think he's wrong for a different reason. On a geological timetable, our species stopped relying on biological evolution as a way of responding to change relatively recently. Instead, we evolve memes and learning, since this can keep up with how fast we change our own environment.

Who's to say that short-term, information-skimming, seven-chats-going-at-once behaviors aren't just another step in that evolution? I suspect that as a species we learn whatever's useful; my grandmother knew the length of the ten longest rivers in the world. I can find the length of the ten thousand. Does that make me better than her? No, just better adapted for the modern world.

So maybe Google is making us collectively smarter.

Similarly, twitch-reflex, information-skimming humans may be just what our global, information-saturated future needs. I don't think Google's making us dumber. Just helping us adapt faster.