As the economic historians Joel Mokyr, Chris Vickers, and Nicolas L. Ziebarth put it in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2015, Google might be the world’s greatest research assistant, but it will never be the world’s greatest researcher. Ditto AI tools like ChatGPT: Research is valuable in terms of human wants, interests, and consciousness, and rapidly advancing and rapidly diffusing tools for doing that research have implications I don’t think we fully understand yet. I’m especially excited about how the global conversation changes as more and more people come online and add their voices. I happen to like Western civilization tremendously, but I look forward to what our great-grandchildren will know as the best that has been thought, written, and created in the West mixes more thoroughly with the best that has been thought, written, and created in the rest of the world.
Consider what Google has done in its ongoing effort to index the world’s information. Search engines and now AI tools will answer almost any question quickly for anyone with an internet connection. You don’t need access to the world’s greatest libraries because Google is putting the contents of those libraries online. Even when you can’t get the full text of a copyrighted title, there is usually enough in the preview to get the gist of it or find the specific quote or page number you’re looking for. And if you can’t find it in Google Books, you can probably find it on Amazon and get what you want by clicking “look inside.”
Google has also allowed anyone to stay on the research cutting edge. Search Google Scholar for a few key terms, and you’ll find just about anything that has been written on it. You can peruse the relevant scholars’ works and citation patterns. A lot of the finished versions of things will be behind paywalls; however, for disciplines with strong working paper cultures, like economics and political science, where it isn’t too much of a stretch to say that something is old news by the time it appears in print, you can almost always find a free version of the paper you’re looking for on SSRN or a similar site. They may not be identical to the word, but they’ll have everything you need to know.
New tools can improve academic writing, most of which is atrocious. Even experts hate to hack their way through a tangled jungle of jargon and passive voice to find the insight. Tools like Grammarly give everyone basic editorial assistance and can help us explain our ideas more clearly and concisely. I didn’t realize just how much I needed to improve my style before I started using Grammarly Pro. The Great Conversation would benefit mightily if more of us bit the bullet and bought the pro version, which, if I remember correctly, averages out to about fifty cents per day.
Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and OpenAI have made it so that anyone with an internet connection can access cutting-edge ideas, data, analytical tools, and the received wisdom of the ages at the click of a button. For this, they have earned many billions of dollars but also the sneering contempt of an academy and intelligentsia that hates nothing so much as success and no one as much as pretentious rabble who confuse their Google search with our academic credentials, accolades, and authority. I remain an optimist, though. Tools like search engines and now AI have laid the groundwork for revolutionary changes in the Great Conversation. Every new connection adds a new voice to the conversation. It gives the person with that voice access to research resources and a knowledge base that would have been unthinkable at the world’s greatest universities even a few short decades ago. As the kids say, I’m here for it.
