We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask; The New York Times, July 8, 2026

 Anne-Laure Le Cunff, The New York Times; We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask

"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."

Stand Up for Open Access. Stand Up for Diego.; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 8/9/16

Ana Acosta and Elliot Harmon, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); Stand Up for Open Access. Stand Up for Diego. :

"The movement for open access is not new, but it seems to be accelerating. Even since we started following Diego’s case in 2014, many parts of the scientific community have begun to fully embrace open access publishing. Dozens of universities have adopted open access policies requiring that university research be made open, either through publishing in open access journals or by archiving papers in institutional repositories. This year’s groundbreaking discovery on gravitational waves—certainly one of the most important scientific discoveries of the decade—was published in an open access journal under a Creative Commons license. Here in the U.S., it’s becoming more and more clear that an open access mandate for federally funded research will be written into law; it’s just a matter of when. The tide is changing, and open access will win.

But for researchers like Diego who face prison time right now, the movement is not accelerating quickly enough. Open access could have saved Diego from the risk of spending years in prison.

Many people reading this remember the tragic story of Aaron Swartz. When Aaron died, he was facing severe penalties for accessing millions of articles via MIT’s computer network without "authorization." Diego’s case differs from Aaron’s in a lot of ways, but in one important way, they’re exactly the same: if all academic research were published openly, neither of them would have been in trouble for anything.

When laws punish intellectual curiosity and scientific research, everyone suffers; not just researchers, but also the people and species who would benefit from their research. Copyright law is supposed to foster innovation, not squash it."