Google and Brain

Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic Monthly article asks if Google is making us stupid. My instinctive response to that question was yes and I had not yet read Carr's take on the matter. He concludes his case with :

as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

When you combine the fact that we use Google to help us navigate our way through our huge off line memory and indeed don't use our brains as a repository of information and facts as we did in our pre-Google days, net-neutrality becomes that much more important.

Without it, all the talk of a flat, interconnected and convergent world where the geeks from Estonia, Mali, Silicon Valley and Shanghai have a level playing field will not amount to much. The guy with access to the express lane and superior content will be information rich and the rest will turn into the digital have-nots who can no longer count on Google to supplement the function of their brains as they have grown used to doing.