Another point. Back when I had to go to a library to find information I had to riffle through books and encyclopedias and by the time I found the facts I was looking for I had run into a lot of other new ones along the way.

Many times in my life, in libraries and bookstores or even in an unread book in my own collection, I would randomly read a paragraph that started me thinking for days. Lee Smolin got me reading real physics; Karl Popper got me thinking about much deeper ramifications of the Uncertainty Principle. And that's science alone. The opening to Tale of Two Cities fer chrissake.

None of this happens with Google.

When did John Horton Conway die? 2020. Done.