I recently finished Read Write Own by Chris Dixon. I found the brief section titled, Artificial Intelligence: The New Economic Covenant for Creators the most interesting because it most closely ties to search. He quickly summarizes historical context around content creators bringing supply and distributors like Google putting that content in front of relevant users. The creator base was fragmented back in the 90s and early 2000s and still today. Dixon argued the fragmentation of content creators prevented them from gaining any sort of power in the relationship between supply and distributor. Had creators been able to band together, the Google we know today might have been different. Instead the result was Google gathering more users to amass a 80%+market share in search today through moving to compliment products it gave away for free such as an internet browser (Chrome) and mobile OS (Android) then moved most of the commerce to search with ads and built a great product that kept users coming back.
The connection both AI and blockchain have to this history of the internet is that it is a chance to reset the power dynamics. His big argument is that blockchain is the only way to do it because of the network design. The root of the design is to give more power to people who contribute value to the network, not the management teams of those networks. If a traditional corporate network tries to do this, over time it will just turn into what you see today as the network attracts users and then extracts as much value as it can for the benefit of the people who own the corporate network (founders, shareholders,etc.).
It is a short part of the last chapter on pages 216 to 222 with some thought provoking questions at the end.
My thoughts are that I want the creative work I am a part of on the internet to have a chance to perform in search and get credit when value is generated. I also want to be able to find and point to the creative work of others as a user. I am really excited about that end-state. The design or technology that powers that discovery is less of my expertise but I find it interesting to stay on top of new technologies and ideas that might gain traction like blockchain.