When AI summaries replace hyperlinks, thought itself is flattened | Aeon Essays

In creating anonymous summaries, AI flattens out all the fascinating architecture of thought that makes the internet hum

In the late 1990s, Google demolished the competition of other search engines because of an extraordinary innovation developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page: the PageRank algorithm. While older search engines, such as AltaVista, Yahoo and (who can forget) Ask Jeeves, relied primarily on matching the terms of the user’s query to the frequency of the same and similar terms on webpages, Google found more useful websites by tracking which pages had the highest quantity and quality of incoming links. The foundational idea behind PageRank is that a ‘web page is important if it is pointed to by…

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