A growing number of intellectuals are now commenting that the immediacy of information is creating knowledge illiteracy. They fear that future generations will lack the reasoning, visualisation and analytical skills that are created by detailed research, collaboration and peer review and that the propagation of a sensationalist, instant, narrow culture without context and values will dilute us.

• Are they being elitist or do they have a point? 
• Is there a difference between information and knowledge? 
• Will artificial intelligence replace the human decision-maker?     
• If we no longer believe in "God, Queen and country", does this leave a moral vacuum? what role models should we believe in?   

Consider this extract from the influential Rough Trade   (the blog of Nicholas Carr)   

"I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated and articulate personality - a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West ...

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance - as we all become "pancake people" - spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or "super-consciousness"? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so - and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.

Google is Alan Turing's cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope. In the words of an unusually perceptive friend: "When I was there, at Google, just before the IPO, I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners.

If the devil came to earth, what place would be better to hide?"

For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true Artificial Intelligence? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply.

But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. "

So what do you think?

• Is Google empowering our culture and making us all equal? or making us all narrow and shallow?
• Are the intellectuals being elitist?  What about Google Scholar? 
• Should we embrace artificial intelligence or be fearful of the economic, social and political consequences?
• Is it the last gasps of a priviledged "Old Order", against an  emerging egalitarian "New Order"?