John Derbyshire explores how Google is changing punditry:

And not everything is yet online in any form. A month or so ago I quoted a line from a John Betjeman poem. Several readers wanted to know where they could read the whole poem. Not on the Web, is the answer — at any rate, Google couldn't find it. Those of us who have actually read and memorized a lot of stuff still have an edge, though probably not for much longer. I feel a bit like the guys who knew how to manipulate slide rules must have felt when pocket calculators came in. I have a head full of junk, crammed with odd and arcane facts, which I can sprinkle through my writing to add charm and seasoning to it. That head full of junk used to be my working capital. But now, anyone else can get the same effect, just by googling.

Another big step will come when mind-machine interfaces will allow one to think a query in one's mind and then get it back so quickly that one can use it in a real-time conversation without any listeners knowing that the information didn't come from one's own mind.