Under this topic I will collect evidence for this case.
[Why Big Tech's bet on AI assistants is so risky | MIT Technology Review](https://Why not privacy-first assistants are dangerous)
Workplace Relevance Report 2023
We asked 4,000 Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Zs what they expect from their digital workplace experiences. Here’s what you need to know to keep them empowered, enabled — and less likely to quit.
88% of employees feel demoralized when they can’t find the information they need to do their work. It’s even worse for younger workers.
Various Survey Statistics: Workers Spend Too Much Time Searching for Information
Information overload is not going away. A recent IHS Knowledge Collections Webinar provided an interesting statistic by Outsell: an engineer’s time spent searching for information has increased 13% since 2002.
A new survey by SearchYourCloud revealed “workers took up to 8 searches to find the right document and information.” Here are a few other statistics that help tell the tale of information overload and wasted time spent searching for correct information – either external or internal:
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“According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information. Put another way, businesses hire 5 employees but only 4 show up to work; the fifth is off searching for answers, but not contributing any value.” Source: Time Searching for Information.
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“19.8 per cent of business time – the equivalent of one day per working week – is wasted by employees searching for information to do their job effectively,” according to Interact. Source: A Fifth of Business Time is Wasted Searching for Information, says Interact
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IDC data shows that “the knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the workday, searching for information….60% [of company executives] felt that time constraints and lack of understanding of how to find information were preventing their employees from finding the information they needed.” Source: Information: The Lifeblood of the Enterprise.
Reality Check: Still Spending More Time Gathering Instead Of Analyzing
Numerous studies of “knowledge worker” productivity have shown that we spend too much time gathering information instead of analyzing it. In 2001, IDC published its venerable white paper, “The High Cost of Not Finding Information,” noting that knowledge workers were spending two and a half hours a day searching for information.
Since then, we have seen the rise of the cloud, ubiquitous computing, connectivity and everything else that was science fiction when we were kids becoming a reality — including the imminent emergence of AI. Yet in 2012, a decade after the IDC report, a study conducted by McKinsey found that knowledge workers still spend 19% of their time searching for and gathering information, and a 2018 IDC study found that “data professionals are losing 50% of their time every week” — 30% searching for, governing and preparing data plus 20% duplicating work.
Clearly, all the technology advances have not flipped the productivity paradigm; it seems like we still spend more time searching for information that exists rather than analyzing and creating new knowledge.
There are follow-up articles by the same author:
Sharing: An Effective Alternative To (Ineffective) Search (forbes.com)
Accessing, Applying and Amplifying Knowledge (forbes.com)
The Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination - The Atlantic
That is the central piece; it is a collection of arguments and evidence.
WP_S_ES_191501 (x1.com)
The traditional approach to enterprise search has focused on informational web search and Big Data use-cases, but those account for only 20% of the use-cases for enterprise search. It is no wonder that business workers cannot find anything – enterprise search has never focused on the core requirement of end-user business productivity.
When Online Content Disappears
38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later
BY ATHENA CHAPEKIS, SAMUEL BESTVATER, EMMA REMY and GONZALO RIVERO
The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.
A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:
- A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
- For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.
This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:
- 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
- 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:
- Nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted. In 60% of these cases, the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. In the other 40%, the account holder deleted the individual tweet, but the account itself still existed.
- Certain types of tweets tend to go away more often than others. More than 40% of tweets written in Turkish or Arabic are no longer visible on the site within three months of being posted. And tweets from accounts with the default profile settings are especially likely to disappear from public view.