Our brains are large partly because we carry around with us from childhood a huge amount of general knowledge – of history, literature, geography, music, you name it.

Will the collective human brain shrink in the coming decades? I ask this because, with an unprecedented amount of information available at the touch of a Google, there is no incentive to remember anything.

My wife tells the story of a university student who, taking an introductory economics (of all things) course at Georgetown University, was asked to divide 24 by 6, and had to resort to a calculator.  By eight years old I for one knew my times tables up to 12 and my spelling was pretty accurate – from memory.  In those days you were required to learn and publically recite Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth, not to mention boring historical dates.  It wasn’t for nothing.  It trained the memory, improved your comprehension, got you used to standing up in public, and were pegs on which to hang other facts and ideas. Now you can look up anything you need and can, if lazy, remember – nothing.

You can’t take this concern in isolation. Scientists and engineers are developing thinking, reasoning robots with capabilities far exceeding normal human ability. The results are coming thick and fast.  In the future citizens will have no democratic control over the uses of these machines, and maybe fewer jobs into the bargain; we don’t know.

Would our positive, forward-thinking, confident and reassuring young readers put my mind at ease about these developments?  I can’t see why they are necessary or desirable.