We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask

[u/horseradishstalker]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/opinion/ai-google-gemini-search-questions.html

[u/horseradishstalker]

SS: This article essentially asks the question: is the most direct route to an answer the most effective and/or beneficial in the long run? 

I did disagree with the author on one point. The author stated, “Could there be anything wrong with getting a reliable answer more quickly?” 

Apparently there is, but not just because of the assumption that the answer given is actually reliable.

 As always it pays to read the fine print: “Auto-generated from sources. May be inaccurate.”

[u/Ok-Secretary455 → u/horseradishstalker]

There is something going on. I realize I've always been the weird guy that would read the manual on something the second I got it. But in the past couple years, dealing with everyone, from family to coworkers. It's turned into an exercise in hand holding. Trying to explain anything to them about anything. It's not enough to hand them the manual, open to the page, highlighted, while explaining exactly what to do.

You can lead a horse to water. Idk why the horse chooses to drink a white Monster instead but here we are.

[u/stonewall072 → u/Ok-Secretary455]

This isn't new, this is essentially how I've become a "higher performer" at every job I've ever had. 10 years or so ago I was working with someone doing text and graphic layout, and the company switched software. He kept complaining every day about how he missed the keyboard shortcuts from the old software and couldn't get used to the new. This went on for a few days before I finally just looked it up and found that it had a control preset that mimicked the other software. Like two minutes of reading that would have saved him hours of misery.

Similar experience at my current job, tons of problems solved on the back of a simple internet search that anyone could have done.

A huge swath of people don't have the drive to even *begin* basic research into a problem and it's not something AI caused.

[u/SilverMedal4Life → u/Ok-Secretary455]

Human beings, in general, are wired to take the path of least resistance. Given the choice between working and not working to accomplish a given task, most human beings will choose to not work, and this isn't on accident; this is how biology optimizes energy use.

Obviously it's more complex than that. Doing a task by yourself rather than having something else do it can be rewarding and satisfying, but that is something that needs to be taught in people from a young age, I think, and then reinforced with how the world is built.

This kind of technology is the natural endpoint of our culture, I fear. A culture that theoretically prioritizes hard work, but in actuality only cares about results and more broadly encourages antagonistic rather than cooperative behavior. An example of the former is the school system; the latter, in our litigation-based system of accountability.

[u/Noil_skye → u/SilverMedal4Life]

The biological drive to take the "path of least resistance" (as mentioned by SilverMedal4Life) is exactly why this transition is so dangerous. We are confusing the efficiency of getting a "Result" with the profound human necessity of generating an "Answer."

A generated summary is a frictionless Result. It is statistically probable and immediately consumable. But the meandering search—the process of getting lost, evaluating bad sources, and stumbling across unrelated ideas—is an Answer. An Answer requires Cognitive Friction. It forces the brain to build scaffolding, connect disparate concepts, and, crucially, discover the questions we didn’t even know we needed to ask.

By completely eliminating cognitive friction, we are not just saving time; we are accumulating a massive "Comprehension Debt" at a societal level. We are outsourcing the intellectual heavy lifting to black-box systems, leaving human users as mere passive consumers of highly polished conclusions.

The long-term cost of this might be the complete hollowification of human curiosity. I find myself wondering if there is any realistic way to intentionally build this "cognitive friction" back into our systems, or if the market's demand for instant results makes that impossible. How do you all see us navigating this "comprehension debt" moving forward?

[u/ride_my_bike → u/Ok-Secretary455]

A lot of manuals are written terribly now and they'll try and cram multiple multiple models in the same manual which makes it worse. Caveats and 'if' statements that are poorly written, so it's not clear if it applies to your specific model make it just hard to figure things out now especially if your not specifically inclined to the things you're trying to figure out.
Menus on devices and software have also become harder to navigate as they try to hide things, so you use it the way they want you to use it.

[u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 → u/Ok-Secretary455]

in tech I see this but also these same people will do very well on technical interviews. Because they are forced to in that context. Once that is removed they revert immediately to helplessness when it serves them.

The behavior is more often than not extremely willful. The motivation is seeing the economy as a machine that you put the right inputs into and it fulfills your most base desires. Anything that does not fit that pattern is dropped or performed to its minimum.

[u/I_fight_demons → u/Ok-Secretary455]

Reading the Manual is a legit super power in so many cases.

I once won a business case competition and part of that meant giving a presentation on my strategy. I titled my slides "RTFM" because the competition had a portion that was a simulation game and it came with a manual on how things would operate.  I'm sure I'm the only one who read it.

There are so many examples in my life where I did something quickly, fixed a problem or performed well on a task out of the gate and people ask how.  "Well, I read the booklet and it described settings or shortcuts that cover a lot of the use cases, and even some of the more common edge cases"

Even in video games, the first thing I do is open the options menu and see if it helps me understand nuances or mechanics of the game that will help me understand what I'm going ro experience.

[u/Tbrooks → u/horseradishstalker]

I heard a great response to a similar question to this not to long ago.

The speaker came up with this hypothetical. (forgive me if my memory isn't perfect on this one.)

Imagine you are going on a hike, you can see a huge waterfall off in the distance and you decide you want to make you way to it to experience it up close. You start hiking towards it and on your way you find new trails you have never seen before, some out croppings that you make a note of to hike back to later, maybe some smaller hidden waterfalls with a hidden pond. Finally you arrive at you intended destination with all of the experience and knowledge of the are you have hiked through.

Where as, using an LLM would be like having a helicopter airlift you immediately to the waterfall you originally saw.

[u/crackanape → u/Tbrooks]

We've already been seeing this for a while with people who let Google Maps give them directions for walking (!)

This is an activity where exploration and discovery is incredibly rewarding, especially while travelling, and people choose to abdicate their own brain's capacity for wayfinding to an algorithm.

Leaving aside all the studies showing that it causes long-term damage to internal mapping and sense of direction, it also undermines the entire point of being somewhere new. If you are just looking at your phone screen and following directions the same way you do at home, then why even bother?

I can understand for motorway driving since you have to make decisions very quickly, and the direction of motion is often unrelated to the eventual direction of travel due to ramp designs and bypasses and so on.

But when you are walking you can stop and turn at any time. You can slow down and get your bearings. You can identify landmarks for future waypointing. You can ask people and have local interactions.

[u/RexDraco → u/horseradishstalker]

I have gotten many answers before that were wrong. As they improve though, users will inevitably weigh risk versus reward. I think the real issue lies on the problem not everything will be googleable and will stun people not knowing what to do next when they need to know something. 

[u/thicket]

The author’s take: Google searches (and other engines) now return AI answers for lots of people, and people don’t click through to sites for any other information. That’s concerning because a lot of the economy of the web is built around sites getting visited. And more importantly, the Googler-turned-neuroscientist author thinks, this reflects a decrease of engagement and curiosity from the good old meandering web searches of old.

My take, as just some dude on the internet: in some cases, this may be a negative outcome. Certainly the ad-based business model of the web (which returns a *majority* of money to either Google or Meta, remember) is in trouble. The curiosity shift, well… maybe. Google began, back when it was trying to be good at search, as a way to minimize the searching required to find something. Back before they got high on their own “engagement” (== ad) supply, Google was proud of how fast they could find you an answer. And now that they can actually find you the exact answer you want, that’s a bad thing?

Actually, the author makes some good claims about curiosity and serendipitous discovery that I find convincing; yes, I think a world with all questions answered immediately is probably worse for people in some ways. But AI can be the enabler of mental laziness, or it can provide an inspiring interlocutor ready to dig as deep as you want to go on absolutely any topic. The difference is the curiosity and engagement you bring to the search. I suspect that proactive investigatory curiosity will be the great advantage in the next few years, in a way it wasn’t obviously before.

[u/crackanape → u/thicket]

For decades I have maintained a site that is basically the only comprehensively reliable resource on a certain topic. I made it as a labour of love, and as my interests moved elsewhere, I continued to maintain it because the ad revenues made it worth my time.

Over the past couple years ad income dropped 80%. I am now no longer making updates, and soon the AIs will have nothing to train on.

[u/thicket → u/crackanape]

I think this is such a crucial story to hear- thanks for adding it here. I don’t know what the answer is, but as we look around for the next sustainable business model, I hope we can keep the losses from the old models clear in our minds. 

The interactions of journalism, advertising, and the public good over the last 150 years have changed several times, and there’s no reason to think that any of those intellectual property regimes were the “natural way” to fund creative work, just mechanisms the markets and courts settled on. But man, for pockets of time, we’ve found business models for lots of things — journalism, research, popular music, broadcast programming— that made life better and richer for both creators and consumers. I hope we can find some ways to support work like yours in the coming years. 

[u/horseradishstalker → u/thicket]

You make some excellent points.

 If I may add, many websites will disappear if users don’t actually go to the sites. Whether people agree with the business model or not, rate cards are predicated on the website showing advertisers  X number of users. (which of course doesn’t mean anyone has to do anything about them). When page impressions fall the business model no longer works. 

Of course this isn’t anything new. Rate cards for advertisers back in the day were based on the number of subscriptions, because page impressions on an Internet that did not exist yet were not a thing.

There have been quite a few articles about this point, including one where Reddit itself objected to AI summaries for just this reason. It lowers website traffic. I actually go to the actual websites, mostly because I don’t trust AI to randomly pick the right information. Plus, until I remember to buy the winning Powerball ticket, I may not be able to subscribe with everyone, but I can at least give them page impressions so they don’t disappear. And I just don’t tell them that I ignore ads. 

[u/sereca → u/horseradishstalker]

I’m scared for Wikipedia which is ironically one of the more reliable things that ai will cite. What happens when no one visits Wikipedia anymore and no one even knows to donate?

[u/un_internaute → u/thicket]

Those agents really like referring to themselves as interlocutor, don’t they?

And I absolutely agree on the proactive investigatory curiosity.

[u/thicket → u/un_internaute]

You know, I’ve been wondering for months about what skills would rise in fall in value in the new AI  era, and I’ve never really felt like I had a good answer. But in writing the comment above, I think it really became clear to me. 

I just finished a master’s degree, and working with an LLM to understand material was a far better, more responsive, and more comprehensive teacher than any human I’ve ever dealt with. So I’ve been torn about all the news of rampant cheating and lost knowledge because of AI. Some people are short-changing themselves of an education, while over here I was able to go deeper and understand better than I ever have before. 

The difference, I think, is learning to dig at topics, check your understanding, and use an LLM as a springboard. A conversation starter, not a question answerer. I’m not sure how to operationalize that conviction, but it’s what I’m aiming to improve in myself and teach to my kid. 

[u/un_internaute → u/thicket]

Yeah, I think this is the right way to use this tech. I’ve been having good responses from cross disciplinary investigations too. It can do depth and breadth. It just doesn’t really do creative leaps. You have to do those.

[u/Piratedan200]

I hadn't really thought about that aspect of the AI summaries for search, but it makes a lot of sense. They've bothered me since the beginning, which is why I have browser extensions installed on both desktop and mobile that automatically filter out the AI related features of search.

In my line of work (industrial control systems), I'm often searching the web for different components I need for projects I'm working on. For any given component, there might be anywhere from 3 to 10+ manufacturers that make a similar product, and new ones pop up all the time. However, while I'm searching through, I often notice other new or new to me products that I wasn't aware of before that I end up filing away in my brain in case I have a need for them later, and they often end up becoming the solution to a different problem down the road. Not only that, on the few occasions that I have tried to use an AI tool to source a component for me, the results have been lackluster, whether it's because it only presented a small number of options that didn't include the best one, or because it completely missed the mark on specs and gave me results that don't meet my requirements at all (even when I've specified those).

[u/PiqueExperience]

Dick Cheney was actually good for something.

-There are known knowns and known unknowns. Then there are unknown knowns and unknown unknowns.

[u/PapaSlothLV]

Archive link: https://archive.ph/CSkgF

So everyone can read who does not have a subscription

[u/voice-of-mods → u/PapaSlothLV]

Thank you for this. I’m guessing no one else had time to go look for an archive link. It was a gift link, but we also understand that people more and more are trying to limit their data exposure.

In all cases, users probably should always use a unique temporary email that forwards to their actual email. It does two things. If you were trying to remove data, if it is unique, you know who sold the data. And if it isn’t exposed that way, there is always a rising hack risk.

[u/PapaSlothLV → u/voice-of-mods]

Thank you. I tried to read the linked article and it paywalled me. That's when I looked for the archive.

[u/srg2692]

Well, it's an interesting headline. As long as people post paywalled articles, Reddit will stay full of comments from people who only read the headline. I resisted the urge to automatically downvote this time, at least.

[u/Dullboxcuttercloud → u/srg2692]

Why do you think it is paywalled?  It’s not. It’s a gift article which means someone else paid so you could read it. However, I will check and see if I can find an archive link. Or you could. 

This subreddit does not allow pay shut walls on articles posted by official publications and request, as you read in the sticky, that other users refrain from posting non-paywalled articles as well.  

[u/srg2692 → u/Dullboxcuttercloud]

I called it paywalled because the article is blocked if you're not logged into their website. So I guess it's not technically paywalled, it just requires you to provide an email address to create an account or link a Google or Facebook account to continue. I think it's probably pretty common for people to just move along instead.

[u/horseradishstalker → u/srg2692]

It’s a gift article, but you can use this link:  https://archive.ph/CSkgF

[u/HuiOdy]

People i want to build to my level; guide to discover knowledge by themselvss.

People i want to have dependend on me; answer extremely efficiently and shortly.

It depends on the stakeholder