The Guardian view on knowledge in an information age: take it to heart | Editorial

In the era of the smartphone, London cabbies are going to keep committing every last alley to memory. It might seem pointless, but we gain insight as well as information by exercising the memory

The Knowledge has been saved, for now. Despite the fact that a smartphone can get you around London with very little skill required, licensed taxi drivers will still have to spend years learning streets by heart. This can seem like an absurd luddite fantasy, of a piece with the cabbies' resistance to any less-guild-like competition, from the likes of Uber.

What's not to like about outsourcing to technology the tedious facts that clutter our brains? We now use calculators for mental arithmetic, Wikipedia instead of libraries, and - most fundamentally - we read the written word instead of memorising epic poetry. Who could object to such progress? Socrates, for one. He would have detested Wikipedia. In a passage of unsurpassed irony, Plato wrote into the Phaedrus Socrates's objection to the written word: that it allowed people to parrot facts without understanding and assimilating them. He even put in a word for the poor texts themselves, helpless to defend themselves against misunderstanding when the author was not there to clarify.

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