I reckon the same fears about losing mental capabilities were raised up the minute someone decided to store informaion hat was usually passed in oral tradition, using this weird new device called a “book”

For my part, having something as Google that helps me quickly locate something without remembering it 100% is great. Often times I’ve found myself wanting to write about something on a blog, but then I have to make a Google search using a few relevant words to find exactly what I meant to use.

In fact, I have been thinking about moving this futher —and trying to use Google as a Ouija board! The idea would be to create a web-based program that makes almost-completely random Google searchs, as a way to respond to queries in the same way you use a traditional Ouija board (I say ‘almost’ because you’d have at least to restrict the answers to a given language, like English). I imagine that a Google Ouija could throw some pretty interesting answers

But, returning to the topic at hand: the ONLY thing I’m against with this tendency integrating more and more electronic gadgets in our life, is that it further deepens the chasm between the poor & the rich; those who have the means to benefit from technology will leave behind those who don’t even enjoy the simplest examples of modern civilization —like electricity or telephone lines. Will we witness the ‘branching’ of two different Homo Sapiens species in the XXIst century, the rich metahumans —that will have access to all the knowledge in the world instantly, as if they were psychic—and the poor ’standalone’?

The only thing that gives me hope is the egalitarian distribution of cell phones in many third world countries, so maybe the same thing can happen with other modern devices if we can make them cheap enough (case in point: the effort to make a $100 laptop, that failed but was on the right track).