(No, not really.)

What If We Could Upload Books to Our Brains?:

At this point [Neil deGrasse] Tyson interjected: Are you saying we could just upload “War and Peace”? Yes, Kurzweil answered: “We will connect to neocortical hierarchies in cloud with pre-loaded knowledge.”

There is a scene in The Matrix where the program for Kung Fu is uploaded into Neo’s brain. He proclaims, “I know Kung Fu!” He and Morpheus spar in the virtual dojo. Basically Kurzweil envisions something similar where we want to learn something, issue a command and poof, we have the knowledge. Currently, we have very easy access to information via the internet, we just need to bridge the gap of entering it into our heads.

As a technologist, I probably would take advantage of this a ton. I would download into my head computer languages, documentation, and implementation strategies for everything I need to know.

As a Luddite, I probably would still read paper books for pleasure. For me, pleasure of reading is not the knowledge imparted by the book. It comes from the process of reading, thinking about the contents, and integrating the information into my knowledge and wisdom.

Knowledge: facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.

Wisdom: the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.

Kind of like Kindle and paper books, just because a new technology exists and I use it, does not mean that I would not sometimes use the old one.