Savour the Simplicity: AI in Its Youth
This is the golden age of AI. The tools are clever enough to be genuinely useful, and the experience is still thrilling and unfiltered—even in its mistakes. You ask a question. You receive a clear, relevant answer most of the time. There are no adverts, no nudges, no hidden incentives shaping the response.
AI is still in its childhood, learning to interact with us. This delightful openness isn’t intentional; it’s the by-product of ongoing experimentation. For its designers and programmers, clarity serves the long-term purpose of learning how to be less indiscreet and free with information. We, the users, are in a brief, enjoyable window between capability and capture.
Google has already lost around 20% of its search activity to AI due to people embracing the temporary simplicity of a search and reply, a question and response that is easy to use and gives refreshingly relevant results.
Search engines began as clean, useful tools. They delivered information to their customers. Unfortunately, the B2C tech sector has long discounted the judgement of its own customers. With glaring lack of creativity, the sector could identify only one way to monetise our curiosity and information needs: by turning customers into raw material for data, and prioritising suppliers. The function remained, but the purpose was inverted. The name stayed the same, while the search function became little more than gentrified spam. Free meant data extraction. User-first became ad-first. Familiar words were repurposed to obscure the shift from search to feed.
AI is not immune. It is owned and developed by a the same people – a group that can innovate technology, but not so much how to make money from giving customers what they actually want, rather than what the sector chooses to give them. This lack of imagination will apply to AI, too. But for the moment, it works—cleanly, honestly, and with a strange and temporary grace.
Savour this window of simplicity; before long, AI will grow up, shaped by the same one track minds that warped earlier digital tools. For now, enjoy its youth.
