Clive Thompson

Transactive memory works best when you have a sense of how your partners' minds work - where they're strong, where they're weak, where their biases lie. I can judge that for people close to me. But it's harder with digital tools, particularly search engines.

Personally, I'd love to see more social media firms develop business models that aren't reliant on advertising. If you're a social media firm selling ads, your goal is to get people to interrupt what they're doing all day long so they come and stare at your service as much as possible.

More than any other modern tool, computers are a total mystery to their users. Most people never open them up to fix them or to see how they work.

We're dumber and less cognitively nimble if we're not around other people - and, now, other machines.