People still question whether Google prohibits reasoning
skills or teaches humans to think.
“I don’t think creating tools means there’s no opportunity to think,” Liz Reid, vice president and head of search at Google, said
during an interview with Access podcast hosts Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger. “We just need to make sure when we’re teaching people to think, we are aware the tools exist.”
Reid, who grew up in a town of 900 people, received that type of feedback while working on Google Maps.
She has worked at Google for more than 20 years. On the one hand, people have lost
the ability to navigate using their memory of towns, she said, but on the other hand, the technology freed people to explore the world.
“We lost some skill, but as a result, we’ve
unlocked new things,” she said.
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AI is changing quickly -- so rapidly that the challenge has become knowing how to teach kids when these tools are available. Calculators did not go from
not being used to jumping into everyone’s hands overnight.
This thinking has been going on for years. Nicholas Carr's 2008 cover story for The Atlantic, titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" argued the internet's ecosystem was reprogramming human
brains, shifting cognitive habits from deep, focused reading toward a shallow, skimming style of
browsing
“Whatever tools, when done well, allow you to do more difficult tasks,” she said. “They allow people to delve into critical thinking. Done poorly, the creator
asks people to do things they already know how to do. Then people cheat.”
The challenge for society becomes figuring out how to use the tools to push what humans can do even more. Not to
replace thinking, but replace it with the next task.
“Can you think, can you reason, can you use tools effectively” she asks. “It’s not like we’re asking
developers to use Assembly language, which you were expected to do. You were not expected to use Assembly language or write code without an ID.”
Now, developers must figure out how to
collaborate effectively with AI to debug code. The question is whether people have the reasoning skills to accomplish the tasks, she says.
When asked whether AI agents in the future will crawl
Google the most compared with humans, Reid said “there will be a world where agents will do a lot of interactions across the internet, but not people. I don’t believe in a world where
it’s all agents.”
When asked how agents may impact Google, Reid reflected on the years mobile emerged. During that time Google executives questioned whether the company and its ad
business would survive, even thrive on a small screen.
“This was a major question, and the company ended up stronger,” Reid said, adding that technology is getting better much
faster.
Reid also spoke about reasoning for large language models (LLMs). She said multimodal models have opened content formats that Google previously struggled with, and expects
to better understand audio and video content in a way not available in the past.
She connected this to a gap in how search works for non-English speakers. For users in
India who speak Hindi or other languages, the web often lacks the information in their language. LLMs changed that. Her comments refer back to Google's Audio Overviews experiment launched in
Search Labs last year that turns spoken AI summaries into search results.
Happy belated International Women's Day, which was Sunday.