Which? is seeking a £3bn payout for UK users as a result of the legal action it is launching.

For nearly two years, the world’s biggest tech companies have said that AI will transform the web, your life, and the world. But first, they are remaking the humble search engine.

Chatbots and search, in theory, are a perfect match. A standard Google search interprets a query and pulls up relevant results; tech companies have spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars engineering chatbots that interpret human inputs, synthesize information, and provide fluent, useful responses. No more keyword refining or scouring Wikipedia—ChatGPT will do it all. Search is an appealing target, too: Shaping how people navigate the internet is tantamount to shaping the internet itself.

Months of prophesying about generative AI have now culminated, almost all at once, in what may be the clearest glimpse yet into the internet’s future. After a series of limited releases and product demos, mired with various setbacks and embarrassing errors, tech companies are debuting AI-powered search engines as fully realized, all-inclusive products. Last Monday, Google announced that it would launch its AI Overviews in more than 100 new countries; that feature will now reach more than 1 billion users a month. Days later, OpenAI announced a new search function in ChatGPT, available to paid users for now and soon opening to the public. The same afternoon, the AI-search start-up Perplexity shared instructions for making its “answer engine” the default search tool in your web browser.

[Read: The AI search war has begun]

For the past week, I have been using these products in a variety of ways: to research articles, follow the election, and run everyday search queries. In turn I have scried, as best I can, into the future of how billions of people will access, relate to, and synthesize information. What I’ve learned is that these products are at once unexpectedly convenient, frustrating, and weird. These tools’ current iterations surprised and, at times, impressed me, yet even when they work perfectly, I’m not convinced that AI search is a wise endeavor.

For decades, the search bar has been a known entity. People around the world are accustomed to it; several generations implicitly regard Google as the first and best way to learn about basically anything. Enter a query, sift through a list of links, type a follow-up query, get more links, and so on until your question is answered or inquiry satisfied. That indirectness and wide aperture—all that clicking and scrolling—are in some ways the defining qualities of a traditional Google search, allowing (even forcing) you to traverse the depth and breadth of connections that justify the term world-wide web. The hyperlink, in this sense, is the building block of the modern internet.

That sprawl is lovely when you are going down a rabbit hole about Lucrezia de Medici, as I did when traveling in Florence last year, or when diving deep into a scientific dilemma. It is perfect for stumbling across delightful video clips and magazine features and social-media posts. And it is infuriating when you just need a simple biographical answer, or a brunch recommendation without the backstory of three different chefs, or a quick gloss of a complex research area without having to wade through obscure papers.

In recent years, more and more Google Search users have noted that the frustrations outweigh the delight—describing a growing number of paid advertisements, speciously relevant links engineered to top the search algorithm, and erroneous results. Generative AI promises to address those moments of frustration by providing a very different experience. Asking ChatGPT to search the web for the reasons Kamala Harris lost the presidential election yielded a short list with four factors: “economic concerns,” “demographic shifts,” “swing state dynamics,” and “campaign strategies.” It was an easy and digestible response, but not a particularly insightful one; in response to a follow-up question about voter demographics, ChatGPT provided a stream of statistics without context or analysis. A similar Google search, meanwhile, pulls up a wide range of news analyses that you have to read through. If you do follow Google’s links, you will develop a much deeper understanding of the American economy and politics.

Another example: Recently, I’ve been reading about a controversial proposed infrastructure project in Maryland. Google searches sent me through a labyrinth of public documents, corporate pitches, and hours-long recordings of city-council meetings, which took ages to review but sparked curiosity and left me deeply informed. ChatGPT, when asked, whipped up an accurate summary and timeline of events, and cited its sources—which was an extremely useful way to organize the reading I’d already done, but on its own might have been the end of my explorations.

I have long been a critic of AI-powered search. The technology has repeatedly fabricated information and struggled to accurately attribute its sources. Its creators have been accused of plagiarizing and violating the intellectual-property rights of major news organizations. None of these concerns has been fully allayed: The new ChatGPT search function, in my own use and other reports, has made some errors, mixing up dates, misreporting sports scores, and telling me that Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is bigger than Manhattan’s (much larger) Central Park. The links offered by traditional search engines are filled with errors too—but searchbots implicitly ask for your trust without verification. The citations don’t particularly invite you to click on them. And while OpenAI and Perplexity have entered into partnerships with any number of media organizations, including The Atlantic—perhaps competing for the high-quality, human-made content that their searchbots depend on—exactly how websites that once relied on ad revenue and subscriptions will fare on an AI-filtered web eludes me. (The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division, which announced its corporate partnership with OpenAI in May.)

[Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about]

Although ChatGPT and Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite their sources with (small) footnotes or bars to click on, not clicking on those links is the entire point. OpenAI, in its announcement of its new search feature, wrote that “getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now, chat can get you to a better answer.” Google’s pitch is that its AI “will do the Googling for you.” Perplexity’s chief business officer told me this summer that “people don’t come to Perplexity to consume journalism,” and that the AI tool will provide less traffic than traditional search. For curious users, Perplexity suggests follow-up questions so that, instead of opening a footnote, you keep reading in Perplexity.

The change will be the equivalent of going from navigating a library with the Dewey decimal system, and thus encountering related books on adjacent shelves, to requesting books for pickup through a digital catalog. It could completely reorient our relationship to knowledge, prioritizing rapid, detailed, abridged answers over a deep understanding and the consideration of varied sources and viewpoints. Much of what’s beautiful about searching the internet is jumping into ridiculous Reddit debates and developing unforeseen obsessions on the way to mastering a topic you’d first heard of six hours ago, via a different search; falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity.

The issues with factuality and attribution may well be resolved—but even if they aren’t, tech companies show no signs of relenting. Controlling search means controlling how most people access every other digital thing—it’s an incredible platform to gain trust and visibility, advertise, or influence public opinion.

The internet is changing, and nobody outside these corporations has any say in it. And the biggest, most useful, and most frightening change may come from AI search engines working flawlessly. With AI, the goal is to keep you in one tech company’s ecosystem—to keep you using the AI interface, and getting the information that the AI deems relevant and necessary. The best searches are goal-oriented; the best responses are brief. Which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising coming from Silicon Valley behemoths that care, above all, about optimizing their businesses, products, and users’ lives.

A little, or even a lot, of inefficiency in search has long been the norm; AI will snuff it out. Our lives will be more convenient and streamlined, but perhaps a bit less wonderful and wonder-filled, a bit less illuminated. A process once geared toward exploration will shift to extraction. Less meandering, more hunting. No more unknown unknowns. If these companies really have their way, no more hyperlinks—and thus, no actual web.

Although I came of age at a moment when politicians on both sides of the aisle were amenable to hearing each other’s ideas, we’re now at a juncture where each side seems more or less unpersuadable, unbudgeable, at least on the big stuff. The same goes for a substantial wedge of the public. We’re all rooted in our own media ecosystems, standing on different epistemological substrates, working with different understandings of what we think—know—is true.

The 2020 election was stolen; it wasn’t stolen. Immigrants are what make America great; immigrants are the problem. Inflation is going down; eggs cost too much. (They do cost too much, though for reasons that probably aren’t Joe Biden’s fault.) Abortion is an issue over which there really may be no compromise—this is life we’re arguing over. Life! What could be more fundamental than that?

I could go on.

And Democrats, just among themselves, are already arguing over why Tuesday night’s election turned out the way it did. How I loathe this part, all the gladiatorial intraparty bedlam: Racism was the main cause. Misogyny was the main cause. The intense estrangement and demoralization of the white working class, that’s what did them in—not only did they see their jobs slip away, but they were told that they were bad people when the words white supremacy entered the liberal lexicon, the mainstream media, and the vocabulary of many progressive politicians. All the talk about trans rights did them in—why do Democrats talk about gender-affirming care (and use that phrase) when parents have legitimate anxieties about their 18-year-olds who want top surgery? “Defund the police” did them in—don’t many people in dodgy or dangerous neighborhoods want cops? Elon Musk and Joe Rogan were the problem. The cultural conservatism of Hispanics was the problem. The failure to recognize illegal immigration and inflation and crime was the problem. Joe Biden’s mental decline was the problem; his not coming clean about it was the problem. The result was inevitable, because center-left parties are folding around the globe like beach chairs. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

So the question becomes: How do we move forward without venom, without looking at strangers—and people within our own party—as potential enemies? As people who, if given their druthers, would undo the American project and destroy its values and make this country profoundly unsafe? (Which is something, by the way, that both sides believe.)

My answer would be something pretty basic, but at least achievable—a step the media can least try to take, that local leaders can partially achieve, but that we, as citizens, can most easily do ourselves: We can focus on our vulnerabilities. We can choose to talk about and pass bills to address and continually emphasize the human hardships that bind us together. We all experience grief. We all have disabled relatives in our family whom we worry about. We all need friendship and mourn the relationships that have faded away. We all get cancer or some other disease that makes us reckon with our own mortality. We get chronic illnesses; our bodies fail.

These five subjects are exactly what I’ve written about since joining The Atlantic in 2021. Suddenly, in my 50s, I found myself unconsciously drifting toward existential matters, because they started looming like smoke. What gives life meaning—this is what matters to me now. If not now, in life’s final innings, then when?

And we share so many other common struggles. Worries about our kids, if we have them. The trials of eldercare. The comforts of religion, if you’re religious, or the values and belief systems and structures that guide you, if you’re not. We all want love. We all want fulfillment. Married people all know how hard marriage is, if they’re in one, and divorced people know how hard divorce is, if they’re in the midst of that.

Most people instinctively lean into these topics.

Last year, I wrote about my intellectually disabled aunt, who had the catastrophic misfortune of being institutionalized in 1953, when she wasn’t yet 2. Along the way, I met a woman, Grace Feist, whose child had the same condition but the good fortune to be born 60-plus years later, and therefore led a far better life, a good life. The times had changed, sure, but her mother was a roaring outboard motor of determination when it came to supporting her girl, learning sign language and building what amounted to a Montessori school in her own home.

She was a devoted Christian who told me repeatedly how much she loved God; I think of the universe as a big-bang-size, multidimensional expanse of indifference. Yet I am psychotically attached to her. In fact, I fell instantly in love—she is warm and generous and funny and partial to silver flip-flops even when it’s 20 degrees out, because she’s used to the cold, having spent years freezing her ass off working security at an oil field in North Dakota, where she got to see the northern lights.

When we came around to discussing politics, she mentioned that she’d voted for Trump in 2020. I had not. But her reaction, almost immediately, was to tell me that she thought Republicans had lost their heads about masks—Was it that big a deal to wear one? Really?—and that she herself always wore one, because her youngest child had immunological issues. And I responded by telling her that I thought the Democratic policy positions on trans issues were excessive and ignored the legitimate concerns of parents, who didn’t want their adolescents making precipitous and irreversible decisions about their body when other factors could so often be at play. (To my fellow Democrats: Yes, there are kids who absolutely know they’re trans—I think of Jan Morris, who realized this at 3 or 4 while sitting under a piano—but I worry about the teenagers who suddenly come to this same conclusion when they hadn’t previously felt this way.)

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

Our impulse was to find consensus. Most people’s ideas about politics are pretty nuanced.

And that assumes they’re thinking about politics in the first place. Many people—27 percent, according to a 2023 Gallup poll—just don’t give that much of a shit. (And 41 percent follow national political news only “somewhat closely.”) It’s not part of their thinking in their everyday life. Grace and her husband, a lovely and quiet guy named Jerry, are far more preoccupied with other matters. I told them I’d just written a story about Steve Bannon, the one and only substantial feature I’ve written about planet Trump; neither had heard of the guy.

Grace and I were tied for life, in spite of our differences. Her child, my aunt, our love and  pained concern for them both—these were far deeper connections. And yes, I know:How hokey and Pollyannaish. Liberals will likely say: We have work to do. Trump is dangerous. We’re faltering on the precipice of catastrophe, if we haven’t already backwards-tumbled into the brink. And yes, I agree. We do have work to do; we should be terrified; we should be mourning the country that was. But more than half the nation doesn’t feel that way. And focusing on the shared things, the so-very-basic things, is the one thing within our control. They’re real. They matter. They’re the stuff of life.

The consumer group Which? is urging shoppers looking for a good deal to beware of fake offers.

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Can we talk about the cables in our lives? I’ll start: I have a circa-2020 iPhone, which features a Lightning port for charging. My monitor, laptop, and e-reader all have ports for USB-C, the connector that looks like a pill; my car has USB-A, which is the older, rectangular design that is somehow always upside-down. My fancy webcam uses something called micro-HDMI, which is not the same as mini-HDMI or standard HDMI, and to get it to work with my computer, I have to plug its cable into a pair of daisy-chained adapters. I have two sets of wireless earbuds, and they, too, take different cables. If I upgraded to the newest iPhone, which uses USB-C, I’d be somewhat better off, but what about my family, and all of their devices with different ports? Let them eat cable, I suppose.

This chaos was supposed to end, with USB-C as our savior. The European Union even passed a law to make that port the charging standard by the end of this year. I do not live in Europe, and you might not either, but the requirement helped push Apple, which has long insisted on its own proprietary plugs, to get on board. As a part of that transition, Apple just put USB-C connectors in its wireless mice and keyboards, which previously used Lightning. (Incredibly, its mice will still charge dead-cockroach-style, flipped on their back.)

People think the shape of the plug is the only thing that matters in a cable. It does matter: If you can’t plug the thing in, it’s useless. But the mere joining of a cable’s end with its matching socket is just the threshold challenge, and one that leads to other woes. In fact, a bunch of cables that look the same—with matching plugs that fit the same-size holes—may all do different things. This is the second circle of our cable hell: My USB-C may not be the same as yours. And the USB-C you bought two years ago may not be the same as the one you got today. And that means it might not do what you now assume it can.

I am unfortunately old enough to remember when the first form of USB was announced and then launched. The problem this was meant to solve was the same one as today’s: “A rat’s nest of cords, cables and wires,” as The New York Times described the situation in 1998. Individual gadgets demanded specific plugs: serial, parallel, PS/2, SCSI, ADB, and others. USB longed to standardize and simplify matters—and it did, for a time.

But then it evolved: USB 1.1, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB4, and then, irrationally, USB4 2.0. Some of these cords and their corresponding ports looked identical, but had different capabilities for transferring data and powering devices. I can only gesture to the depth of absurdity that was soon attained without boring you to tears or lapsing into my own despair. For example, the Thunderbolt standard, commonly used by Apple and now on its fifth iteration, looks just like USB-C. But to use its full capacities, you need to connect it to a Thunderbolt-compatible port, which is identical in appearance to any other that would fit a USB-C connector. Meanwhile, today’s Thunderbolt cable will probably charge your Android phone, but an older one might not effectively power your current laptop, or some future device. As one manufacturer explains, “For charging most devices including laptops, Thunderbolt 3 will provide virtually identical speeds to USB-C. However, Thunderbolt 4 requires PC charging on at least one port, whereas USB-C charging is optional.” Which … what does that even mean? It means that Thunderbolt is a kind of USB-C that is also not USB-C.

[Read: We’ve forgotten how to use computers]

Muddled charging capabilities are not particular to Thunderbolt. If you have ever plugged a perfectly USBish USB cable into a matching USB power brick and found that your device doesn’t charge or takes forever to do so, that’s because the amount of current your brick provides might not be supported by the USB-shaped cable and its corresponding USB-underlying standard, or it might be weaker than your device requires. Such details are usually printed on the brick in writing so tiny, nobody can read it—but even if you could, you would still have to know what it means, like some kind of USB savant.

This situation is worsened by the fact that many manufacturers now ship devices without a charging brick. Some, like Apple, say they do this for ecological reasons. But more cost-conscious manufacturers do so to save money, and also because forgoing a brick allows them to avoid certifications related to AC power plugs, which vary around the world.

[Read: One cord to rule them all]

A lack of standardization is not the problem here. The industry has designed, named, and rolled out a parade of standards that pertain to USB and all its cousins. Some of those standards live inside other standards. For example, USB 3.2 Gen 1 is also known as USB 3.0, even though it's numbered 3.2.  (What? Yes.) And both of these might be applied to cables with USB-A connectors, or USB-B, or USB-Micro B, or—why not?—USB-C. The variations stretch on and on toward the horizon.

Hope persists that someday, eventually, this hell can be escaped—and that, given sufficient standardization, regulatory intervention, and consumer demand, a winner will emerge in the battle of the plugs. But the dream of having a universal cable is always and forever doomed, because cables, like humankind itself, are subject to the curse of time, the most brutal standard of them all. At any given moment, people use devices they bought last week alongside those they’ve owned for years; they use the old plugs in rental cars or airport-gate-lounge seats; they buy new gadgets with even better capabilities that demand new and different (if similar-looking) cables. Even if Apple puts a USB-C port in every new device, and so does every other manufacturer, that doesn’t mean that they will do everything you will expect cables to do in the future. Inevitably, you will find yourself needing new ones.

Back in 1998, the Times told me, “If you make your move to U.S.B. now, you can be sure that your new devices will have a port to plug into.” I was ready! I’m still ready. But alas, a port to plug into has never been enough.