interesting how certain things are so pervasive and ubiquitous and considered fundamental fabric of society -- and yet can disappear so fast. woke up this morning realizing that i haven't done a "proper" google search in years. remember when we were typing various keywords in google, scanning through first page results, skimming through pages and pages of mostly-unrelated-but-hopefully-mildly-related textual content, when solving a problem? trying to estimate the credibility of a source, typing symptoms of the flu and having to skirt all the "you have cancer" and "you're pregnant" 2007-era forum results. chunking progressively shorter pieces of whatever stacktrace you got, and spending hours (days!) reading blog posts and SO answers and piecing together how things were done. obvious in hindsight, but i only now realize how much all this was still, fundamentally, shaped like going to the library. a faster horse. acceleratory, yes. but not ontologically different than search & retrieval in the 70s. i wonder how much of the world we're seeing today, that we might consider natural laws on how we go about things, is just one model generation from being overhauled. what's the next horse? one of my current bets is medicine as population science. modern healthcare is built around the average patient. we get prescribed standardized exams, standardized protocols, standardized drugs. the whole system is pattern-matching from that average to us, because personalized inference over n=1 is too expensive. but what if it's not anymore? if we can have entities that can reason over our genome, our labs, our history, and literature, all at once... "standard of care" starts sounding very much like "first-page-of-google-results". not just acceleratory - ontologically different! how many other fast horses are out there?