Opinion | The Problem With Google’s A.I. Overview – The New York Times

When an A.I. answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You got what you came for, but you also lost what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no obvious relationship.
Researchers call this incidental learning, and it’s the mechanism behind many serendipitous discoveries. Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting. When the physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected a persistent hiss in their radio antenna in 1964, they could have written it off as equipment noise; instead, they kept asking what it might be, and they ended up discovering the radiation left over from the Big Bang.

Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens. The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints. The loss is not serious in any single case. But fewer detours and fewer unexpected discoveries will have a cumulative effect. Over time, people trained this way become better at extracting ready-made conclusions than building connections of their own.

— Read on www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/opinion/ai-google-gemini-search-questions.html