Experience Valuable than Database

From Weekly I/O#58


Every quality that made a person more valuable than a database was a product of experience.

Book: Exhalation: Stories

This is also from Ted Chiang's novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects, included in the collection Exhalation: Stories. We can use this as one of the heuristics to evaluate whether a role or function is irreplaceable by AI.

This also highlights the difference between Google Search and ChatGPT in terms of answering fact-based queries. While ChatGPT provides succinct responses, Google Search provides the context (links to websites). Although navigating the websites of reference might not necessarily make Google Search better, it offers the experience of exploration, which makes it different.

This also reminds me of how Instagram is stealing search traffic from Google among Gen Z users. When looking for recommendations on what to buy or where to go, they turn to social media influencers or friends. The journey to finding context differentiates people's perception of search results.


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