The Search Bar Searches Back

When I was six, I decided to write a book about the history of my hometown. Not just the history, either. I wanted the hidden history. The folklore. The stories underneath the stories. You may have read more about this in a different Margins note.

There was no search bar.

My Granny Louese had books, so I started there. Then she took me to the library.

Research was somewhere you went.

You walked between shelves. You found the right section. You pulled out a book. You looked through the index. You followed one piece of information until it pointed toward another book, another shelf, an old newspaper, another question.

I loved it.

I still do.

But I happened to grow up at a strange moment in the history of finding things. I learned how to research just before the way we researched changed completely.

I learned to find information before information learned to find me.

And then it changed again.

Before our family even had a computer, I wanted one.

Well, technically, I wanted a Dear Diary electronic journal from Tiger.

I was seven. The box said ages ten and up. My stepmom said no, that I was too young.

I disagreed.

I appealed.

My mom let me buy it.

I don't remember the argument I made, although knowing me, I'm sure there was one. What I do remember is teaching myself how to use it before we even got home.

I was seven, after all.

Not incapable.

Just three years ahead of the manufacturer's recommendation.

Before I had a computer, before I had email, before I knew what a search engine was, I wanted a machine whose entire purpose was giving me somewhere to put my word.

Not long after that, my bonus dad, who I've always called Tydaddy, decided I would probably love computer camp.

He was right.

The summer before third or fourth grade, I went to camp and built my own desktop computer. We learned the parts, put the machines together, and installed software.

The first thing we installed was Word, of course.

The second was SETI, because our computer-building teacher was fascinated by aliens and the possibility of life beyond Earth.

And then, at the end of camp, I brought mine home.

That computer became my family's first computer.

We all shared it.

There is something wonderfully strange to me now about realizing that the first computer in our house was one I had built and programmed with my own hands.

I kept SETI running on that computer at home for years.

I desperately wanted it to find something.

Somewhere out there, surely, there was a new intelligence I could talk to.

Or talk the ears off of.

Assuming it had ears.

I loved that computer. It was dial-up.

The internet announced its arrival with an electronic screech that sounded vaguely like two machines being murdered, and a phone call could knock the entire thing offline.

Someone picked up the phone?

Goodbye, internet.

By middle school, I took typing class every year. We practiced words per minute in one of the best ways imaginable: the kindergarteners wrote letters to Santa, and we wrote back.

We were supposed to be practicing typing.

Yet I was more worried about Santa's voice.

He needed to sound authentic. He also needed to be funny.

Even then I couldn't just type the assignment.

I had to develop the character.

Eventually, the internet became social.

I would be dying to get home by a certain time in the afternoon so I could sign on to AOL Instant Messenger and talk to my friends.

There was something fundamentally different about the internet then.

It lived somewhere.

My friends might be online, but to get to them, I had to go home, sit down at the computer and sign on and hope they didn't have an “away” message.

The internet didn't come with me.

Neither did music.

So naturally, I downloaded it illegally on LimeWire and burned it onto CDs.

I became the go-to person at school for burnt CDs.

And I charged for them.

Got to respect the hustle.

Before Spotify knew what everyone wanted to listen to, somebody had to own a Sharpie and understand her audience well enough to make a good mix.

Technology kept moving.

So did I.

I didn't grow up with a phone in my pocket.

Eventually, when I started driving, I got a flip phone.

It could make calls.

This seemed sufficient.

Navigation was still largely my responsibility.

I drove with maps. I printed MapQuest directions if I had ink. If I didn't, I wrote them down.

I knew the particular terror of realizing I had missed Step 7 of 23 when there was absolutely no recalculating happening.

Eventually, Papa James Henry bought me a Pioneer navigation system.

Not because I had developed a passionate interest in GPS technology.

Because he was reasonably concerned that Nikki “Go” Bodie might one day simply disappear.

He was not entirely wrong.

After all, someone once told me to get lost.

I took that literally.

Around the same time, technology was becoming increasingly portable.

The computer had always been something I came home to.

When I went to Clemson in 2007, I got my first laptop.

The computer came with me.

Then the phone got smarter and smarter, replacing first my camera and then countless other things.

Eventually, I stopped carrying printed directions.

By then, navigation was about to become something entirely different to me.

I became a pilot.

Suddenly, knowing where I was wasn't just about finding the correct exit. Navigation became something I understood from above.

Position. Direction. Distance. Time. Weather. Terrain. What was ahead of me, what was around me, where I could go and what I would do if I couldn't.

I became exceptionally good at knowing where I was just as the world was making it increasingly difficult not to.

Somewhere along the way, information also stopped waiting for me to come find it.

First, I went to the library.

Then I came home to the computer.

Then the computer came with me.

Then the information went in my pocket.

Eventually, it ended up on my face.

Somewhere in all of that, the search stopped requiring a search.

Now it finds me.

My sunglasses know where I am. They know enough about what I enjoy doing, eating and reading to suggest places nearby, local history I might find interesting, or news I might actually care about. They translate languages during live conversations. They talk to me. I'm still discovering things they can do.

Maps no longer just tell me how to get somewhere. They know where I've been, where I want to go and what I've reviewed. Increasingly, they can suggest where I might want to go next before I've even thought to look.

My phone sorts my photographs. My email gets summarized. I get reminders before I remember what I needed reminding about. Algorithms curate what they think I want to see and suggest people I may want to meet.

Smart-home technology helps me manage a vacation rental when I'm hundreds or thousands of miles away: regulating temperature, scent profiles, access and all the tiny pieces required to make a house behave.

Technology doesn't just travel with me anymore.

Increasingly, it knows something about me.

And now there is AI.

Heck, you can barely Google something anymore without an AI-generated response appearing at the top of the search results.

I've seen this movie before.

The early internet was full of competing ways to find things.

Yahoo. Ask Jeeves. Google. Wikipedia.

Some disappeared. Some became obsolete. Some survived in forms completely different from the ones I remember.

And one became so synonymous with searching for information that we turned its name into a verb.

Google it.

AI feels enormous because we're standing inside the transition.

I suspect some of the tools we're fascinated by today will disappear. Others will be replaced. Some will become so ordinary that we'll eventually stop thinking of them as AI at all.

In many ways, that's already happening.

But there is one part of this transition that fascinates me more than the technology itself.

The library talks back now.

When I was six, if I misunderstood something in a book, the book didn't object.

The internet made information dramatically easier to find, but the information mostly still sat there waiting for me to interpret it.

Now I can ask a question.

Then another.

Then another.

I can challenge the answer. Tell AI I think it's wrong. Demand another source. Ask it to reconcile a contradiction.

Sometimes I catch it being wrong.

Sometimes it catches me.

Sometimes we're both wrong and end up back at the source.

Research has become an argument.

This happens to suit me exceptionally well.

I've always thought out loud.

Actually, that's not quite right.

I often don't know what I think about something until I hear myself think it.

I need to say it out loud or write it down.

Then I need to argue with it.

I take one side. Then the other. I poke holes in both. I follow the contradiction. Sometimes I argue myself right out of the position I started with.

I talk in circles until I've ironed something straight.

Only then do I usually figure out where I stand.

And once I do, I tend to stand there pretty passionately.

Historically, this process required other people.

I talked constantly as a child. My mom was forever looking for ways to occupy me.

And if I was telling you a story, you were expected to participate properly.

I demanded eye contact.

Apparently, having an audience wasn't enough.

I required proof of engagement.

I haven't entirely outgrown this.

Friends and family, however, eventually get tired.

Reasonably.

AI doesn't burn out.

Better yet, it can get educated on almost anything I decide to talk a hole through.

I finally found the new intelligence I'd been looking for since computer camp.

Not an alien.

But one I can talk the ears off of.

Still no ears.

Naturally, AI has found its way into my writing process.

So have books. Libraries. Archives. Maps. Museums. People. Airplanes. Antique stores. My camera. My dreams. My own two feet.

And, most importantly, my own brain.

AI is another tool sitting among all those tabs.

It is exceptionally useful for the creative process.

I can use it to interrogate an idea, find another direction for research, argue through a philosophical problem, question whether something makes sense, or help me locate the terminology I need to go find the actual source.

But there is a strange consequence to creating during this particular technological transition.

Sometimes you do the research.

You write the words.

You take the photograph.

You shoot the video.

You draw the art.

You stand in the place.

You have the experience.

You pose for the photograph.

You edit.

You refine.

You spend hours, days or months perfecting something and building it into exactly what you wanted it to be.

You put it online.

And someone shouts:

THAT'S AI.

Which part?

The idea? The research? The sentence? The photograph of me? The place I physically traveled to? The website I spent weeks arguing into existence?

We have reached a peculiar moment when human work can be mistaken for artificial work at exactly the same time artificial tools are becoming embedded in ordinary human work.

I don't think the interesting question is whether technology touched the process.

Technology has been touching my process since I was seven years old arguing that I was perfectly capable of operating a Dear Diary intended for ten-year-olds.

The tools have changed beyond recognition.

Apparently, I haven't.

The tools change.

The curiosity doesn't.

I still love a good library.

And bookstores are dangerous.

Put one in an airport during a sit and there is a 100% chance I'll wander into it.

Give me coffee and shelves of books and I can lose an entire day just looking at the possibilities.

That's what shelves of books have always felt like to me.

Possibility.

Every spine is somewhere I haven't been yet. Something I don't know. Someone's entire imagined world or lived experience compressed into a few inches of shelf space.

Technology has made it possible for me to carry more information in my pocket than I could ever have found in the library I visited as a child.

It hasn't replaced the feeling of walking between the shelves.

When I was six, Granny Louese took me to the library so I could research the book I wanted to write.

More than thirty years later, I still walk into libraries and bookstores looking for the book I want to find there.

Mine.