Is Google making us stupid?

We are living a revolution of the mind and how we learn. Stay tuned for the Metaverse. The impact of the internet on our lives is not even measured properly at this moment. Its impact on the brain and cognitive behavior is immense. I’m the first millennial! (Some would call me Xennial) I was born in 1981. When the computer and internet arrived in every household, I was 13 years old. It was 1994. I rapidly got acquainted with the medium. DOS, Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista (not too much of an Apple fan). I was also part of the hacker movement, P2P and Torrents. Always one step ahead of the mass. I even found a lucrative sideline from it.

Most of what I learned and used in my life is from the Internet. No school I attended at that time had any program offered to match what the internet gave me. Maybe MIT. Who knows? I was one of the nerds, misfit kids who loved to stay up late browsing, play 56k videogames and find weird chatrooms. At the time, the Encarta encyclopedia was a well of information and it made me so much smarter. I would read so many articles and print them for my friends between a download of a nude girl and a Duke Nukem game. The access to the information was infinite. A bit slow but gigantesque. Google arrived. Basic at first. Nothing of the behemoth we know today. I frequented many schools and I have been involved in so many projects and programs in my life. I always felt like the pedagogy was a bit late. I have ADHD. 

I can tell you about this story I know.
A tiny man finds a ring and keeps it secret. Many years later, the ringmaster wants the ring back so he can use it to dominate the world. A group of warriors unites to destroy the ring before the ringmaster casts doom upon the living earth. The fellowship succeeds, destroys the ringmaster, and finds a new king to unite the people. The end.

Sounds familiar?

This is how our brain works. I resumed thousands of pages in 3 – 4 lines. There was a time where information was not available outside of a library. I remember high school when no one knew LOTR. Pop culture was a myth or centralized. Music defined your group. You needed to be at a select place with a select group to know and understand a select topic. Like math or religion in a classroom. The internet has broken that barrier and our brains are quickly evolving beyond our imagination. The information is globalized. We are probably losing the fellowship of men factor at the same rate. Elephants evolved in our lifetime to lose their tusks to avoid poachers. Imagine what Humans can do with unlimited information for the next 100 years. Google and other platform are literally rewiring our brains to the point that regular books will probably become obsolete. Objects of collection for the purists. Reinventing the way we read and process information. Catapulting us into such a scary yet amazing future. The library does not have the same scent as before. Although it is very poetic it will become a vestige of the past like a papyrus scroll. I can download an MIT education now, crack all the software licenses from multi-million-dollar enterprises. I can spend one night looking at all the paintings of the great masters. That was a privilege for the wealthy in the past. Has long as the individual is motivated and capable, his access to intelligence is beyond infinite.

Google is intelligence.

Robert Brouillette (2021), The Millennial revolution.
Google.stanford.edu (1998)