“ I was reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s AMA today and when explaining why he thought he would suck at Jeopardy, he cited a ripper quote.

“Never memorise what you can look up in a book”
Albert Einstein

It was a famous response by Einstein when a colleague asked him for his phone number and the physicist had to look it up in a phone directory. It reminds me of uni exams, especially programming ones which consist largely of trivial syntax traps. The real world is like one big never-ending open book test.

It’s not an unfamiliar quote, but I wonder if anyone forecasted its relevance entering the new millenium. Had Einstein been born a century later, he would of been a googling maniac. Sometimes I google the time, because I can. In fact every week, I do the following almost a hundred times:

Ctrl + T
Google search
Scan excerpts of results on page 1
Ctrl + W

Answers are extracted within seconds. We don’t sustain wonder anymore. This isn’t a blog post expressing how nifty it is that Google has pretty much indexed everything in existence. It’s me wondering how it will affect the generations that know no other way.

My generation is in the middle; we’ve been exposed to it from our early teens. It wasn’t a complete monopoly back then, you would have to go through Excite, Yahoo or AltaVista until you found what you were looking for. This was before you could ask search engines questions, and definitely before the Jedi mind-reading autocomplete feature. At first the wow factor was in access to information. Now it’s generally regarded that if you can’t find something by googling it, it didn’t happen.

I’ve heard whispers of a time when people could talk shit at pubs and not be audited by wikipedia on the spot. Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error. Where you had to actually call your friends or family to see what they were up to.

I wonder what it was like.”

 Source:http://wernah.com/2012/03/i-fucking-google-everything/