> Sometimes there is joy in discovering things for yourself.

Agreed. And webrings still exist in certain corners of the internet.

> the oracle currently relies on humans publishing new information

New? When I ask it how to do something with a piece of software it's perfectly capable of answering me by means of direct interrogation of the source code.

I'll grant you that it owes ~all of its knowledge of the world at large to having been bootstrapped using the more or less complete body of humanity's published works. However I think that was merely the quickest path to bootstrap it as opposed to the only one.