“I’m not sure we’ll actually be smarter as individuals, but some sort of collective intelligence is a possibility. Most of it boils down to network—social networks and technological networks and their ever-growing overlap. We might be able to make better choices, simply because we’re not making them all alone.” —Stine Gotved, professor and cybersociologist working with several universities in Denmark and owner of Net:Work

“My answer is predicated on the possibly unrealistically optimistic hope that self-policing of the quality of shared information will increase dramatically over the coming years. If Wikipedia and its ilk can adopt a Slashdot-esque user-moderation model (only one not so reliant on adolescents with hormone-driven territorial urges), the Web has the potential to evolve into the hive intelligence it so desperately wants to be. Peer review continues to be the most robust mechanism for quality control; it will need to be greatly increased in scope for Google stupidity to be minimized.” —Robert G. Ferrell, information systems security professional, US government, former systems security specialist, National Business Center, US Department of the Interior

“The Internet has facilitated orders of magnitude improvements in access to information. People now answer questions in a few moments that a couple of decades back they would not have bothered to ask, since getting the answer would have been impossibly difficult.” —John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, former director of cyberstrategy and other projects for the Federation of American Scientists

“Google is simply one step, albeit a major one, in the continuing continuum of how technology changes our generation and use of data, information, and knowledge that has been evolving for decades. As the data and information goes digital and new information is created, which is at an ever increasing rate, the resultant ability to evaluate, distill, coordinate, collaborate, problem-solve only increases along a similar line. Where it may appear a ‘dumbing down’ has occurred on one hand, it is offset