Of course it is making us far smarter than ever before, and we are doing greater things by the day. Technology is like 90% good, and 10% bad, and the bad part is usually because of people abusing it, not from the technology itself being inherently bad.

Also the books comment isn't really fair because there is so much reading on the internet. We might be seeing a move from reading novels to reading short stories and articles on the internet, but you can't really say that is a bad thing. If you look at Wikipedia, it is pretty obvious it is searched and read far more often than an encyclopedia ever was. It isn't even a contest, even before the internet no one ever pulled out their encyclopedia and just started reading entries in it. People do that on wikipedia all the time however.