#12 From Priests to Chatbots: The Evolution of Knowledge-Seeking

Or how we shortened the gap between a question and an answer

Historically, finding answers to our questions was difficult and time consuming. Thanks to technological progress, we have progressively shortened the distance between a question and an answer.

In ancient times, people relied on experts in their community such as priests, shamans, or elders to find answers. Sometimes people had to travel many days to find the right person and get the answers.

Then we built libraries and collected knowledge in one place. While libraries brought the information together, many people still had to travel long distances to get to them. People also had to read through a lot of books to find the right answers to their questions.

Then encyclopedias came and shortened the path to answers. They didn't have all the information, but they provided answers to most common questions. Now people could access information from their homes.

Then came the internet and search engines. Google brought all the world's knowledge in one place. Although Google didn't provide answers, it provided all the relevant links to answers.

Today it seems like we shortened the gap once again with conversational AI. You can type any question, no matter how complex in ChatGPT and get a thoughtful, written response that synthesizes the worlds knowledge. The gap between a question and an answer is the shortest it has ever been.

I learned it from here.