Technology is usually a wonderful thing.  Sure, there are negative applications to most new advances in science, but for the most part, it seems like technology helps more than it hinders.  Some can do both, but for now let’s just think about the positive – it hurts less.

When I went back to college for a “continued adult education” in 1993, shortly before the advent of the “Information Superhighway”, I was introduced to a wonderful technology that I had no idea even existed.  In the college’s library sat several run-of-the-mill computer terminals, early nineties models that didn’t do much more than list the books the library contained – or so I thought.  As it turned out, these PCs were connected to a database that held a plethora of information; far more than just a long list of book titles.  These machines actually contained knowledge from each book and periodical that went well beyond what the Dewey Decimal System ever hoped to achieve.  When you sat down at the monitor, you were greeted by what appeared to be a search engine web page – although, at the time, web pages didn’t yet exist because the birth of the World Wide Web was still about a year away.  At this “page” you could type in a word relating to what you were searching for.  For example, I was doing a research project on immigration, so I typed in “Immigration” and was greeted with large passages from all the books and magazines the library owned that had articles surrounding immigration.  And not only that library, but hundreds of other libraries across the country!  If the book you needed was in Wisconsin, you could check out some of the info it contained and if you wanted the library would request it for you and have it within a couple of days.

Needless to say, I was flabbergasted.  This was unprecedented!  I was stunned at the fact that this much information was instantly available at the touch of a few keystrokes. The system certainly made research a lot easier than it was when I went to high school – we’d spend hours flitting through the card catalogue in the hopes of finding a book that might help us out.  Our school’s library had a very limited number of books anyway; and most of the good ones were out when you needed them since teachers tended to give the same assignments to everyone at the same time.  If they let the class out to visit the library for a new assignment, you’d better be the first one through the door.

Within a year or two of bearing witness to this monumental leap in reference technology, I signed up for a new-fangled dial-up Internet connection at home and with the installation disk came a web browser with a link to a site called “WebCrawler”.  WebCrawler (a site that’s still up and running today) is a search engine, something most of us are very familiar with by now.  But back in 1994, a search engine was far more magical and mysterious than the computers at the college library.  WebCrawler would not only show me a book regarding my search, it would take me to websites that actually contained the information I was seeking.  This was amazing to me then and, though I’ve become a bit more jaded, it’s still pretty amazing to me today.

In 1994 it was unheard of to have this much data freely available for the asking.  Today there are billions of websites with trillions of pages and thousands of ways to attain the info you want.  It makes me wonder: does all this data, so easily come by, make us smarter than our predecessors?  If I had asked my father thirty years ago, “When was the Crimean War?” he would have yelled at me and put me to work since, apparently, I had nothing better to do than bother him with ridiculous questions.  Today, I point my son to Google or Wikipedia when he asks, “Who was the twelfth president?”  It was Zachary Taylor, by the way – he died 16 months into his term from acute gastroenteritis.  If you want to know what that is, I suggest visiting WebMD.com.  If only Zachary Taylor could have…

When I try to retrieve names, places and dates in my own head, I often come up short.  My memory fails me at times, but with the Internet, I just point and click and there’s what I was looking for.  Can I consider the Internet a part of my inadequate brain, making it, in essence, semi-adequate?  We remember and recall things using associative memories – what’s the real difference if I just type something instead?  Sure, the web isn’t physically attached to my body, but the way technology advances, it may not stay that way for long.

Scientists have already shown that with the right equipment, humans can control certain devices, such as a mouse cursor, with their minds.  So what if the “certain device” was a small wireless PC that was always connected to the web?  Could a person then “know” the answer to just about any question simply by navigating through the proper search engine using only their minds to do so?  Wouldn’t that be akin to “trying to remember something”, only using a more reliable system than their own memory?  It may sound like science fiction, but thirty years ago, so would have the Internet itself.

So, OK, we’re not there yet, but it seems we’re close.  I can retrieve just about any information I want right now by searching properly which means, as far as I’m concerned, that I have the answers to nearly every question provided there’s a web-connected PC nearby.  Does this mean my brain is more adequate?  Yes, yes it does.  Each time I search for info on the web, I remember some of what I learned.  I also remember how to find that info again, should I forget its gist.  And forget I will; it’s one of the things I do very well.  Perhaps when they install my wireless brain-web interface, they can upgrade my memory as well.  I’ll take four gigabytes, please.