The prevailing theory among professional worriers in the tech field is that we’re leaning too much on artificial intelligence to provide us with basic facts and figures as our memories collapse under a surfeit of information. It seems to make sense that such a shift would occur. Then again, my memory has always sucked.

German newspaper publisher Frank Shirrmacher addresses the issue in “The Age of the Informavore” on Edge. His meditation on the subject attempts to answer George Dyson‘s question, “What if the price of machines that think is people who don’t?” An excerpt from the piece:

“We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett‘s response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.”