When the connector becomes the source
When the search engine becomes the author, who owns the knowledge, and who's responsible for it?
Google I/O showed more than new features. It revealed a shift in role. That triggered me when I read Benedict Evans’s newsletter. For decades, Google was the intermediary, the connector between your question and someone else’s answer. You searched, Google pointed, and you arrived at a source. The knowledge had an origin you could trace, question, trust or distrust. That’s changing.
As Benedict Evans observed: For all of this, Google continues to shift emphasis from taking you to a resource made by someone else to generating its own summary or version of the answer, made from everything it’s seen on the web. Google will tell you the answer, based on the averages of everything other people have made.
The connector becomes the author. This might sound like a technicality, but I think it is more systemic. When Google generates the answer instead of linking to it, Google becomes the sender. The knowledge is now Google’s. Not referenced, not attributed in any meaningful way—owned. Presented as if it emerged from the search box itself. Next up might be a full integration of YouTube, taking you to the right clip of a movie if you are looking for a how-to, Benedict adds. Indeed, might be. Or might even go further: in line of the AI overview: the how-to made in a synthetic form, synthesized from all how-to’s in one new synthetic video version to consume. This is not far away if you see what the studio of NotebookLM already can produce.
Consider what this means for responsibility. When Google generates a flawed answer from a thousand articles, who is accountable? Google has placed itself in the position of knowledge-holder without the traditions, standards, or obligations that usually come with that role. And imagine the next step: interfaces that don’t just generate answers but compose personalized experiences. Google is mentioning planning these type of adaptive pages. In line with the vibe-coding movement, people could build personal services tailored exactly to their needs. Not one synthesized answer for everyone, but a personalized service shaped to your history, your patterns, your inferred preferences.
One of my long-time beliefs, which also became part of the new Cities of Things Manifesto, is that you need to design friction into AI systems. To design for the legibility of agency, and also to retain the ability to encounter resistance, surprise, unoptimized experience, and unfiltered encounter with others within agentic environments. I do not know if this will be part of Google’s implementation yet, but I can imagine they will choose another experience. Of sudden change, the interface anticipates, adapts, and serves. The experience feels seamless, natural. Like it’s yours.
So whose agency is at work? When you search, you’re seeking an active posture. When a personalized service is delivered, you’re receiving. The difference is subtle but profound. One keeps you in the role of author of your own inquiry. The other makes you a passenger in an experience designed around a model of who you’ve been.
We’re used to thinking about what technology does. We’re less practiced at asking what position it takes. Google taking the position of source rather than connector changes the landscape of knowledge itself, who holds it, who presents it, and who answers for it. We can see what that might lead to with the other big player in the manipulation of our digital life.
And we haven’t even talked about agents yet, the systems that don’t just answer but act on your behalf, let alone if that is entering our physical encounters with things and environments…
This triggered thought is part of the weekly newsletter by Iskander Smit. In that newsletter, you also find a human-picked selection of last week’s news on human-AI relations, physical AI, and tech impact on civic life.
Iskander Smit is the founder and chair of Cities of Things, the expertise center for new possibilities for products, services, and environments where intelligence enters physical space. He works as a creative director, strategic advisor, and research partner.