alt Hacker NewsI have heard multiple arguments that point towards this future, where AI largely becomes "normal" technology. I'm hopeful for it. There are tons of great use cases for AI, but it absolutely should not be in... everything.
This feels similar to the timeline that lots of new technologies go through. Blockchain (put that into everything!). The internet + dot com era were probably similar as well.
Treating ANYTHING like an everything tool just seems to feel this way. There's no reason I want to use AI to buy something on Amazon. Or plan a vacation for me. I absolutely want to use AI to scan through 5000 files and find that one thing I was looking for though. Different applications.
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I almost always use Claude when shopping online, to find unknown unknowns. And I loved using Claude to plan a recent trip, instead of not bothering to plan at all because it’s so tedious. Just as a counterexample.
Shopping on Amazon is increasingly like scanning through 5000 files of very similar products at variable prices with variable options and variable delivery choices.
AI + a custom search engine - which might not use Google's metrics, or Google's sponsorship - would be a killer product.
So my prediction is that a lot of aggregator and middle man sites - like Amazon - could disappear within the next decade.
And Google might too.
An open network of independent search agents would be a gamechanger for the entire Internet.
Which is not to say this would be easy. But AI is actually well-suited to making ideas like these possible.
It would - finally - be genuine disintermediation.