I think this point can be generalized to a lot of products in tech: The original potential of computers was to be able to provide better maps - meaning, giving people supercharged abilities to store and organize information.

What we got instead are navigation systems: You're not supposed to organize information at all, instead, you're supposed to tell some software system what you want and it will magically bring you there - no need to understand any greater structures.

Google made that quite explicit when they introduced GMail and "disrupted" the way we do email: Before, people where curating their mailboxes with subfolders, etc. Gmail was the promise that this wouldn't be necessary anymore: You can just dump everything onto a big pile and use the search if you need something.

AI seems like an extreme version of that.

Maybe we should go back and produce more maps again.