"More than 60 percent of Google searches in the United States now end without the user clicking on a link. We type a question, read an artificial intelligence-generated summary of the results and leave with our answer.
Google is hardly alone. Claude, ChatGPT and upstart competitors like Perplexity do roughly the same thing: They take a question and swiftly return an answer, compressing what used to be a meandering journey through the internet into an immediate arrival at your destination. The explorative phase of searches — clicking through links, stumbling onto unexpected pages, following a reference that leads to somewhere unplanned — is disappearing.
For anyone who publishes on the internet, this is a troubling development, since it lowers website traffic and makes it hard to protect and profit from your intellectual property. But you might think it is good news for internet users. Could there be anything wrong with getting a reliable answer more quickly?
There is. By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity — and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world...
I hope my former colleagues at Google and the engineers building similar tools elsewhere take these suggestions to heart, and that the industry develops best practices that protect curiosity rather than treating it as an afterthought. The space between a question and an answer has value, and that value should not be engineered away.
The most important discoveries are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that delivers only what is asked for, we will lose the capacity to discover what we didn’t know to ask."
No comments:
Post a Comment