#96 A Slightly Smaller Life

"There is just a slightly smaller life that you experience as a completely normal one." - Ken Woodward Seven experiments. Ten thousand people. Half learned a topic from an AI summary, half from ordinary web links. Same facts. The AI group came away with shallower knowledge, and when researchers propped the door open, placing live source links right beside the summary, almost nobody walked through. Sixty-eight percent of Google searches now end without a click. With an AI Overview on the page, eighty-three percent. This episode is about what that costs. Not wrong answers, wrong answers get caught. It's the second question that never gets asked, which leaves no error message and no gap in the record. Just a slightly smaller life that you experience as a completely normal one. Then: a man on a corner in Northeast D.C. who gave me a name that wasn't his, and what it took to get the real one. One more thing, I need your help naming something. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions?)) Keep questioning!