There is an inherent and not entirely unfounded bias evident in this article that external knowledge is inferior to internal knowledge. It is certainly true th

There is an inherent and not entirely unfounded bias evident in this article that external knowledge is inferior to internal knowledge. It is certainly true that reaching the point where you don't have to look something up usually means you have a deeper understanding of it and are more competent and fast using it. Quality of knowledge matters, but there are limits to how much knowledge a single person can internalize. Quantity has a quality all it's own. Having vast amounts of external knowledge available for rapid access offers unique capabilities. Skill at searching as well as quality of search tools can enable people to do things that would have taken far longer just a couple decades ago when any given search would have involved dead-tree books. Perhaps we should start thinking of google and other such tools, not as poor substitutes for knowledge painstakingly internalized, but rather, an augmentation of human intelligence that grants humans rapid access to far more knowledge than any single human could possibly internalize in a lifetime. As these tools improve, this augmentation effect will become more pronounced, as will the deleterious effects of being cut off from the internet. The blurring of lines between internal and external knowledge may also intensify with future technologies. e.g. Wetware out of a William Gibson novel lets people with data jacks install modules of mental expertise at will. Will an article like this even have meaning once people can look up a module of deeply internalized knowledge and install it in an instant? One day, the Internet's knowledge may be indistinguishable from our own.