Paul Saffo, the futurist, says he could divide the technology world into two kinds of people: engineers and natural scientists. He says the world outlook of the engineer is by nature optimistic. Every problem can be solved if you have the right tools and enough time and you pose the correct questions. Other people, who can be just as scientific, see the natural order of the world in terms of entropy, decline and death.
Those people aren’t necessarily wrong. But the engineer’s point of view puts trust in human improvement.
But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds. EVERYONE has been talking about an article in The Atlantic magazine called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It is hard to think of a technology that wasn’t feared when it was introduced. In his Atlantic article, Mr. Carr says that Socrates feared the impact that writing would have on man’s ability to think. The advent of the printing press summoned similar fears. It wouldn’t be the last time. When Hewlett-Packard invented the HP-35, the first hand-held scientific calculator, in 1972, the device was banned from some engineering classrooms. Professors feared that engineers would use it as a crutch, that they would no longer understand the relationships that either penciled calculations or a slide rule somehow provided for proficient scientific thought. It freed engineers from wasting time on mundane tasks so they could spend more time creating. Many technological advances have that effect attention becomes the valued commodity