With technology continuing to improve, tech companies have been analyzing what the future of search may pan out to me. Voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and much more have called into question the possibility of chatbots and AI replacing search engines. Emily M. Bender, a UW professor studying studies computational linguistics and ethical issues in natural-language processing, published a paper that criticizes what they see as a rush to embrace language models for tasks they are not designed to address.

She said, “The Star Trek fantasy—where you have this all-knowing computer that you can ask questions and it just gives you the answer—is not what we can provide and not what we need.”