Despite those 100 billion–plus searches for answers per year (in the U.S. alone), no one would have believed 30 years ago that there was an $82 billion business in answering people’s questions for cheap or for free. There weren’t many MBAs dreaming of schemes to fill this need. The demand for questions/answers was latent. People didn’t know how valuable instant answers were until they had access to them. One study conducted in 2000 determined that the average American adult sought to answer four questions per day online. If my own life is any indication, I am asking more questions every day. Google told me that in 2007 I asked it 349 questions in one month, or 10 per day (and my peak hour of inquiry was 11 a.m. on Wednesdays). I asked Google how many seconds in a year and it instantly told me: 31.5 million. I asked it how many searches all search engines do per second? It said 600,000 searches per second, or 600 kilohertz. The internet is answering questions at the buzzing frequency of radio waves.
But while answers are provided for free, the value of those answers is huge. Three researchers at the University of Michigan performed a small experiment in 2010 to see if they could ascertain how much ordinary people might pay for search. Their method was to ask students inside a well-stocked university library to answer some questions that were asked on Google, but to find the answers only using the materials in the library. They measured how long it took the students to answer a question in the stacks. On average it took 22 minutes. That’s 15 minutes longer than the 7 minutes it took to answer the same question, on average, using Google. Figuring a national average wage of $22 per hour, this works out to a savings of $1.37 per search.
In 2011, Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, calculated the average value of answering a question in a different way. He revealed the surprising fact that the average user of Google (judged by returning cookies, etc.) makes only one search per day, on average. This is certainly not me. But my near constant googling is offset by, say, my mother, who may search only once every several weeks. Varian did some more math to compensate for the fact that because questions are now cheap we ask more of them. So when this effect is factored in, Varian calculated that search saves the average person 3.75 minutes per day. Using the same average hourly wage, people save 60 cents per day. We could even round that off to a dollar per day if your time is more valuable. Would most people pay a dollar per day, or $350 per year, for search if they had to? Maybe. (I absolutely would.) They might pay a dollar per search, which is another way of paying the same amount. Economist Michael Cox asked his students how much they would accept to give up the internet entirely and reported they would not give up the internet for a million dollars. And this was before smartphones became the norm.
We are just starting to get good at giving great answers. Siri, the audio phone assistant for the iPhone, delivers spoken answers when you ask her a question in natural English. I use Siri routinely. When I want to know the weather, I just ask, “Siri, what’s the weather for tomorrow?” Android folks can audibly ask Google Now for information about their calendars. IBM’s Watson proved that for most kinds of factual reference questions, an AI can find answers fast and accurately. Part of the increasing ease in providing answers lies in the fact that past questions answered correctly increase the likelihood of another question. At the same time, past correct answers increase the ease of creating the next answer, and increase the value of the corpus of answers as a whole. Each question we ask a search engine and each answer we accept as correct refines the intelligence of the process, increasing the engine’s value for future questions. As we cognify more books and movies and the internet of things, answers become ubiquitous. We are headed to a future where we will ask several hundred questions per day. Most of these questions will concern us and our friends. “Where is Jenny? What time is the next bus? Is this kind of snack good?” The “manufacturing costs” of each answer will be nanocents. Search, as in “give me an answer,” will no longer be considered a first-world luxury. It will become an essential universal commodity.
Very soon now we’ll live in a world where we can ask the cloud, in conversational tones, any question at all. And if that question has a known answer, the machine will explain it to us. Who won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1974? Why is the sky blue? Will the universe keep expanding forever? Over time the cloud, or Cloud, the machine, or AI, will learn to articulate what is known and not known. At first it may need to engage us in a dialog to clarify ambiguities (as we humans do when answering questions), but, unlike us, the answer machine will not hesitate to provide deep, obscure, complex factual knowledge on any subject—if it exists.
But the chief consequence of reliable instant answers is not a harmony of satisfaction. Abundant answers simply generate more questions! In my experience, the easier it is to ask a question and the more useful the reply, the more questions I have. While the answer machine can expand answers infinitely, our time to form the next question is very limited. There is an asymmetry in the work needed to generate a good question versus the work needed to absorb an answer. Answers become cheap and questions become valuable—the inverse of the situation now. Pablo Picasso brilliantly anticipated this inversion in 1964 when he told the writer William Fifield, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.”
So at the end of the day, a world of supersmart ubiquitous answers encourages a quest for the perfect question. What makes a perfect question? Ironically, the best questions are not questions that lead to answers, because answers are on their way to becoming cheap and plentiful. A good question is worth a million good answers.
A good question is like the one Albert Einstein asked himself as a small boy—“What would you see if you were traveling on a beam of light?” That question launched the theory of relativity, E=MC2, and the atomic age.
A good question is not concerned with a correct answer.
A good question cannot be answered immediately.
A good question challenges existing answers.
A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked.
A good question creates new territory of thinking.
A good question reframes its own answers.
A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business.
A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario.
A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious.
A good question cannot be predicted.
A good question will be the sign of an educated mind.
A good question is one that generates many other good questions.
A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do.
A good question is what humans are for.
• • •
What is it that we are making with our question-and-answer machine?
Our society is moving away from the rigid order of hierarchy toward the fluidity of decentralization. It is moving from nouns to verbs, from tangible products to intangible becomings. From fixed media to messy remixed media. From stores to flows. And the value engine is moving from the certainties of answers to the uncertainties of questions. Facts, order, and answers will always be needed and useful. They are not going away, and in fact, like microbial life and concrete materials, facts will continue to underpin the bulk of our civilization. But the most precious aspects, the most dynamic, most valuable, and most productive facets of our lives and new technology will lie in the frontiers, in the edges where uncertainty, chaos, fluidity, and questions dwell. The technologies of generating answers will continue to be essential, so much that answers will become omnipresent, instant, reliable, and just about free. But the technologies that help generate questions will be valued more. Question makers will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new fields, new industries, new brands, new possibilities, new continents that our restless species can explore. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.