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‘Google’ will remind them of all the details as needed. This is the continuation ad infinitum of the process launched by abacuses and calculators: we have become more ‘stupid’ by losing our arithmetic skills but more intelligent at evaluating numbers.” —Andreas Kluth, California correspondent, The Economist

“It is a mistake to treat intelligence as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt we will become worse at doing some things (‘more stupid’) requiring rote memory of information that is now available though Google. But with this capacity freed, we may (and probably will) be capable of more advanced integration and evaluation of information (‘more intelligent’).” —Stephen Downes, senior research officer, National Research Council of Canada, and specialist in online learning, new media, pedagogy and philosophy

“The new learning system, more informal perhaps than formal, will eventually win since we must use technology to cause everyone to learn more, more economically and faster if everyone is to be economically productive and prosperous. Maintaining the status quo will only continue the existing win/lose society that we have with those who can learn in present school structure doing OK, while more and more students drop out, learn less, and fail to find a productive niche in the future.” —Ed Lyell, professor at Adams State College, consultant for using telecommunications to improve school effectiveness through the creation of 21st-century learning communities

“The question is flawed: Google will make intelligence different. As Carr himself suggests, Plato argued that reading and writing would make us stupid, and from the perspective of a preliterate, he was correct. Holding in your head information that is easily discoverable on Google will no longer be a mark of intelligence, but a sideshow act. Being able to quickly and effectively discover information and solve problems, rather than do it ‘in your head,’ will be the metric we use.” —Alex Halavais, professor and social informatics researcher, Quinnipiac University; author of Search Engine Society

“What Google does do is simply to enable us to shift certain tasks to the network—we no longer need to rote-learn certain seldom-used facts (the periodic table, the post code of Ballarat) if they’re only a search away, for example. That’s problematic, of course—we put an awful amount of trust in places such as Wikipedia, where such