Oh, and about Google (and Yahoo!) making us smarter, see also: Language. Among other things, this little tool lets us collapse broad and highly detailed concepts into single units. Then, we can sling impressively complex things around in our limited-workspace minds. (Remember the Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.) But of course, we run the danger of no longer actually retaining the original concepts we've swapped out. But nowadays we have search engine keywords for that.

Stan Schroeder: "Let's face it: we're not exactly becoming brighter by using Google. In fact, in the traditional education sense, we�re getting stupider, at least with certain types of tasks. However, we've learned to do something else. We've learned how to use Google to get information. It sounds like an evolutionary step, a natural progression. Instead of using your brain, you're using something else - something that works faster and easier. It will be interesting to see how this - if it keeps up, and my bet is that it will - will affect our ability to think in the future."

Welcome to the internet, Mr. Schroeder. This might be your primer on the post-human future, as well. To catch up on the concepts of tools and externalized intelligence, take a look at pen and paper, pocket calculators, and infrared remote controls. With the use of these, respectively, I remember less, calculate less in my head, and walk less across the room to push buttons. Pretty soon, I'll be a drooling idiot. Oh wait, too late.

Now, the real discussion to have is not whether using Google makes you dumber - but whether you want to rely entirely on Google to make you smarter! Of course, that does come up in the article quoted above, but it's rather late in the essay.

Charles Stross: "Meet your descendants. They don't know what it's like to be involuntarily lost, don't understand what we mean by the word "privacy", and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever. They are incredibly alien to us."

I, for one, look forward to growing old in a world where memory diamond records, atom by atom, everything from everyone. I can see the primitive outlines now, and it only looks like it'll get more wonderful.