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“Google will make us stupid and intelligent at the same time. In the future, we will live in a transparent 3-D mobile media cloud that surrounds us everywhere. In this cloud, we will use intelligent machines, to whom we delegate both simple and complex tasks. Therefore, we will lose the skills we needed in the old days (e.g., reading paper maps while driving a car). But we will gain the skill to make better choices (e.g., knowing to choose the mortgage that is best for you instead of best for the bank). All in all, the gains outweigh the losses.” —Marcel Bullinga, futurist and founder of Futurecheck, writing the book Welcome to the Future Cloud

“Certain tasks will be ‘offloaded’ to Google or other Internet services rather than performed in the mind, especially remembering minor details. But really, that a role that paper has taken over many centuries: did Gutenberg make us stupid? On the other hand, the Internet is likely to be front-and-centre in any developments related to improvements in neuroscience and human cognition research.” —Dean Bubley, founder, Disruptive Analysis, an independent technology analysis and consulting firm

“Google has already made us a more fact-based society. Back in the day, what fact was worth a trip to the library? Now we expect to get our facts in 0.3 seconds. The link—and blogs—also taught me the necessity of a new ethic of the correction. When I was a reporter, mistakes were something to be avoided and corrections something to dread. I’ve learned online that corrections enhance credibility and that readers understand that facts are continually uncovered in a process of discovery. But we need to change what and how we teach. It’s memorization that may become the atrophied muscle in the Google age: no longer necessary when discovery and recall of any fact is a search away.” —Jeff Jarvis, author of What would Google Do? and associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism

“What the Internet (here subsumed tongue-in-cheek under ‘Google’) does is to support some parts of human intelligence, such as analysis, by replacing other parts such as memory. Thus, people will be more intelligent about, say, the logistics of moving around a geography because ‘Google’ will remember the facts and relationships of various locations on their behalf. People will be better able to compare the revolutions of 1848 and 1789 because