Wolfram Alpha--thumbs up or thumbs down?

Wolfram Alpha has debuted to much fanfare and expectation. While I disagree with Joyce Valenza that it will become the "go to" for certain types of searches (at least in its current form), I can agree that it has some small specific uses, such as computations and quantitave data gathering. There are two things that trouble me about it. First, when I read the mission, "Today's WolframAlpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone," I started laughing. All Systemic Knowledge, really? Then I stopped laughing. Who knows, it might be possible, but I doubt it. The problem is, people will simply think that all knowledge is computable. However, here is where the second thing, and then a third cropped up in my mind. When you look at the "source" of the information you requested, Wolfram Alpha lists itself first, then if you click on something (students will so do that, right?) you get the actual sources for the information. I think this is a problem on many levels. It is really dishonest. Wolfram Alpha claiming to be the source is like the reference librarian claiming that you should put her name on your bibliography. It is really misleading. Wolfram Alpha is most definitely NOT the source of the information. It is the window through which the information is viewed. It may even arrange the data in a pretty graph or visual format, but it did not originate the data. How many times have we told students that Google is NOT a source, it is a search engine? Now comes the part that bothers me even more. Are we trying to "outsource" our brains? Am I ready to take computer selected data as what I really need to know about something? Sure, for fast, quantitative data, it may work, but what if what I need to understand about something involves a little analysis, a little critical thinking? Think of all the things Wolfram Alpha will NOT show you. I did a sample search of Texas A&M University. (My daughter is student there, whoop!) I got a lovely table showing enrollment figures and a bunch of other numbers (how many students in each college, blah, blah, blah). What I didn't get was any real qualitative information about the University. I guess what concerns me about this is not that it exists, but that students who are already so "answer" driven, will stop looking for more than just the quantitative. They will cease to consider other aspects of a topic. They will simply take the first "answer" that pops up and not look any further than that. I recently read a news article about the Ohio State library having to downsize. Some were concerned that they might lose one of the nice features of a large research collection, which is the ability to browse the shelves and make seredipitous discoveries. One of the commentors popped back something along the lines of "Browsing the shelves in the 21st century, you've got to be kidding!" How sad for him. You can browse online as well as on shelves. What's wrong with serendipity? What's wrong with taking a tangent and seeing where it leads? Sometimes it leads you to a deeper understanding of what you started out looking for in the first place. Sometimes it leads you to a new path of discovery. What is wrong with truly wanting to learn, rather than just find "the" answer?