It's time for a change. something needs to give.
Google, facebook and social media sites have already killed a lot of curated content creation in exchange for the opinion of the masses, thumbs up and likes.
There has to be a better way to organise content on the Internet which doesnt scatter quite so much information around.
The internet treats the world like its hundreds of billions of notice boards all over the planet - which you can magically find and read.
Social media consolidated those notice boards into a fewer number of shared boards - which hang off of a particular topic (Reddit), person (facebook/twitter), movie (imdb), product (amazon).
CoPilot is going to do the searching for you - but what I would like to see, is the AI being used to fact check, the AI to be constantly measuring the quality of content and comparing it.
I want the AI working out what is content created by experts.
What AI hopefully can do is separate opinion from facts. Although not if Elon Musk has anything to do with it.
Robin, while separating opinion from facts sounds like the ideal, smart, rational people frequently disagree. While there is one correct answer to the capital of Mongolia or the pass completion rate of Tom Brady over his career, there isn't one "right" answer for many subjects like economics, physics, medicine, or controversial subjects like climate change. I think the larger danger is implying that there is a correct answer to any of these, because that strips people of their skepticism and diminishes curiosity (we're less curious about subjects with definitive answers), which is what drives discovery and advancement.
I'm not sure that's Elon Musk's point, but I think it's at least part of it. There is great danger in just ascribing "expert" status to one or more sources. That's not to say someone teaching graduate economics out of MIT's Sloan School on the subject of inflation drivers isn't a more reliable source than some guy on Facebook, but "experts" are also frequently wrong, and that's OK -- science is built in the advances of the past, but it's never complete. Recall that at various points in time we "knew" ulcers were caused by stress (the scientist who originally proposed it was H. pylori was ridiculed), the shortest distance between two points in open space is a straight line (Einstein showed how gravity bends space), electrons were particles (quantum mechanics shows they're also waves), the arable land on the Earth could never generate enough food to support a billion people on the Earth (advances in farming techniques and technology blew past this), etc.?
Skepticism and curiosity are more important than the "answer." They drive advancement. Suggesting a single answer is correct fosters mob mentality, which is terrible.
I would prefer, and this would be a HUGE benefit of AI over traditional search (and Bing's AI chat does do this to some extent) would be to present the various theories and perhaps give some weighting to some over others in terms of how widely held they are (e.g., the majority of physicists believe that dark energy and its antigravity effects form at a constant rate as result of the universe expanding, but many believe that this rate has changed and will continue to change over billions of years).
That way, we get the benefit of what the AI search does FAR BETTER than traditional search: gathering data from multiple sources and combining it into a single answer. Traditional search only shows individual points of data, which is a fundamentally different way to learn about a subject.
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