You're definitely right on about Google AI. I actually went to google to NOT have AI, and now that it mostly tries to force the AI on me, I've just defaulted to Claude (with me fact checking every link and fact).
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out a year from now. To be fair I hated Facebook when it came out and thought it was a fad...little did I know.... So who knows.
But at least today, I'm with you on this analysis.
Is there any scenario in which you think this goes gangbusters? And how do you feel about Google's shift into commerce (i.e.not sending traffic to you anymore and trying to be the place for commerce to happen?)
I think Google has way too much power. And make Google much more powerful. Which I don't think is a good thing. I think this might go gangbusters, but what's going to happen is people are going to become stupider because they're going to accept facts that are not facts.
AI that a practitioner chooses and AI that a platform imposes are different. One makes you faster. The other makes you dependent.
The consent question isn't just about privacy. It's about whether people are developing any intuition about how to use these tools at all, or just outsourcing the thinking to whatever Google decides is the answer. And when the answer is wrong, most people don't know to question it. That's the scarier part.
What governance and awareness is actually being built around the impact on factual integrity in search? Because right now it feels like the infrastructure for critical thinking is being removed at the exact moment we need it most. We are trading the habit of verifying for the convenience of being told.
You're definitely right on about Google AI. I actually went to google to NOT have AI, and now that it mostly tries to force the AI on me, I've just defaulted to Claude (with me fact checking every link and fact).
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out a year from now. To be fair I hated Facebook when it came out and thought it was a fad...little did I know.... So who knows.
But at least today, I'm with you on this analysis.
Is there any scenario in which you think this goes gangbusters? And how do you feel about Google's shift into commerce (i.e.not sending traffic to you anymore and trying to be the place for commerce to happen?)
I think Google has way too much power. And make Google much more powerful. Which I don't think is a good thing. I think this might go gangbusters, but what's going to happen is people are going to become stupider because they're going to accept facts that are not facts.
AI that a practitioner chooses and AI that a platform imposes are different. One makes you faster. The other makes you dependent.
The consent question isn't just about privacy. It's about whether people are developing any intuition about how to use these tools at all, or just outsourcing the thinking to whatever Google decides is the answer. And when the answer is wrong, most people don't know to question it. That's the scarier part.
What governance and awareness is actually being built around the impact on factual integrity in search? Because right now it feels like the infrastructure for critical thinking is being removed at the exact moment we need it most. We are trading the habit of verifying for the convenience of being told.