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Humanity is Changing Search. That’s Good.
Machines are starting to talk human. This is a fundamental shift and is a profound change of the cognitive age.
In 2008, technology writer Nicholas Carr wrote a six page article in The Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It wasn’t a rail against Google specifically, but rather the cognitive impact of the internet, that it could threaten our stupidity. It didn’t. Now we have “answer engines” and search engines are offering up more comprehensive answers. Will they make us stupid? Actually, I argue, quite the opposite.
The very nature of how we search, from how we use it to why, signals a profound shift that is more meaningful to our relationship with machines than generative AI. Bold statement. What is happening is that machines are now learning to speak human, rather than the other way round, which it has been for decades.
In a way, we can see the early decades of search engines and how we used them as the digital version of our hunter-gatherer period. With answer engines and LLMs, we are entering the agrarian age of our digital evolution.
In way, this is a reclamation of our cognitive sovereignty. For decades, our interaction with information systems, from knowledge bases at work to search engines, has been about keyword stuffing, teasing with boolean operators, tags. We were forced…
