A couplet of essays illustrate the insatiable drive for the tech industry to foist AI enhancements to a suite of baseline products (an inuring narrative that we’ve encountered before from guilds to shingles, to 
telephone directories, to 800 numbers, to websites, to encryption, to block-chain) with a trial of ‘search generative experience’ by default, making chatbot recommendations scraped from the web rather than (ir)relevant links. An experiment for now, it is indicative of the direction behemoths would take user queries—even at the risk of not just being seen as promoting content that no one is looking for but also as the creator of said bad results, redefining what a search-engine does with a curatorial capacity. The counterpoint is somewhat of an apology for the trajectory of seemingly better performance, promising utility, with the wholesale intrusion, offering that AI does not comprehend what “to google” is and cannot differentiate between requests for research and requests for navigation, unwilling to accept a point of departure and what’s easy to know but increasingly harder find. Although championing what is juried by humans (both noting how it is informed our non-synthetic archives), neither developmental observation bodes well for curiosity.
one year ago: assorted links to revisit, the Book of Mormon (1820) plus the musical stylings of Takeshi Terauchi
two years ago: more links to enjoy plus some local street art
three years ago: Balance (1989), the Fiat factory test track plus the Hapsburgs attempt to retake the throne (1921)
four years ago: the GOP Death Cult, fomites plus the Schengen Area (1995)
five years ago: more shadowology, The Handmaid’s Tale as a graphic novel, the Frauenhofer Institute (1949), a FOIA primer plus property development naming reforms
