One thing that’s hit me lately: Google trained us all to be self-sufficient information hunters and synthesizers. When we need to diagnose a health issue, fix a coding bug, choose a vacation destination, or write a paper, we’ve learned to search, read, compare sources, and synthesize into personalized informed decisions or work. All the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. Better learn how to leverage it. “Let me Google that for you?” captured this ethos. How dare you ask a question that you could find or figure out yourself!

Well… thanks Google. The more I find myself taking advantage of AI, the more I realize I’ve been unlearning this trained self-sufficiency. What we all have now is an expert available to us to ask any question or even delegate many tasks. Yes, sometimes we need to give it some back-up documents, or clearer instructions, and sometimes it has no idea what it’s talking about (not that it will tell you). But if you can move from a mindset of self-sufficiency by default, to asking the LLM expert at your fingertips by default, a world starts to open.

This isn’t about moving queries off of Google into ChatGPT. It’s also a shift in the kind of problems we can tackle, and how we’d approach them:

Are the experts perfect for every question? No, of course not. (I like how Ethan Mollick describes the “jagged frontier.”) Is this the worse they will ever be? Yes.

This isn’t just about an AI doing the work we once did of finding/synthesizing information. One thing that hits me is how much more personalized an AI result can be than a Google search will ever be. The paradigm is just so different. When I do a Google search, we all have some expectation of objectivity in the results. We critique Google when two people do the same search (e.g., on a news event) and get different results. And of course the means by which Google personalizes results has been more implicit – inferring from my searches, geo, etc. So personalization gets pushed to the edges to sites that are also stuck in a Google / search paradigm. Take TripAdvisor as an example. I have to figure out the best hotel for me by looking for clues in reviews that are relevant to me personally. Whereas with an AI, I can just tell it about my family and vacation preferences. I can store those preferences in a project, add my own reviews on hotels or trips we’ve taken, and get personalized recommendations.

This transition won’t happen automatically. At least for everyone older than GenZ, self-sufficiency is deeply ingrained. Unlearning it will take conscious effort. But once you start, you realize how different the future will be. Have fun.

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