This is knowable

When I was a child the Internet was born and phones crawled across the surface of the planet and the whole of human knowledge became accessible with a moment's effort. Querying the well of human knowledge was novel, then routine, then a fundamental part of our humanity as we offloaded less important cognition. When my family disagreed around the dinner table it became our tradition to say the words: "this is knowable." A prompt for someone to search for the answer.

Has Des Moines always been the capital of Iowa? Who was present at the signing of the Magna Carta? Why does Pluto not count as a planet? Did Maya Angelou actually say that line about "when someone shows you who they are…"?

We weren't the only ones. It's common to settle a disagreement with a search. Who hasn't fact-checked themselves, or someone else, with a glance at their phone? This new development in human behavior seems like an obvious net good: fewer mistakes, more knowledge. But I believe this is a trap.

There are rarely simple answers, even to simple questions. Imagine a straightforward question: How many human senses are there? We were all taught five (taste, touch, smell, sound, sight), but we'll search for confirmation. That search used to agree with your primary school memory, but now the AI summary says something about up to ~30 senses? Somehow there is disagreement? If you start to read more you'll find it depends on how you define "sense." And if you count the senses that we're not consciously aware of, like the interoreceptors that measure stuff like arterial blood pressure. And that's to say nothing of the fact that almost every sense is consciously experienced as a layering of multiple other senses. Taste is not just chemicals on taste buds, but a pastiche of smell, taste, and feel (texture, temperature), and even sight.

At this point you might pause to consider your options:

1. You can shrug and answer something like, "the definitions are models of reality and there is no absolutely correct way to model reality or answer the question how many senses humans have without a long discussion of what qualifies as a sense."
2. You can shake your head clear and say, "five senses, sure enough!"

In a conversation, you would have wasted several seconds researching only to say the question is unanswerable. Or done the same only to accept a "good enough" answer anyhow.

To say it differently, knowledge is not a retrieval problem for any sufficiently complex problem, and any knowledge that is reducible to a retrieval problem isn't worth retrieving in the heat of a conversation.