Or it could wind up being a pretty big waste of resources. On the one hand you have the ability to extract "apparent knowledge" in a conversational form. On the other hand you are killing the ability to create new knowledge and as an added bonus consolidate power into service providers that work worse than ever.
This "conversational knowledge" stuff is probably just a primitive and inefficient form of AI that may be superceded by other innovations. It need not have any real impact on new knowledge, any more than billions of ordinary people babbeling for hundreds of years. The service provider concern is understandable, but I think competition may keep this tech available to everyone who can reasonably afford it. We still have private computers and software despite the possibility for everything to be run from data centers and using proprietary subscription-based software.
