while I share your enthusiasm for the bright future ahead, there is a missing link between this and "book me a room in San Francisco with a view of the ocean", namely that data is behind closed doors.
There is a bunch of data that google can use[1] because it is made explicitly available. But many sources don't want that.
As an example, consider "book me flights for the cheapest route between lisbon and kiev".
It is a trivial thing to do, provided you can get airline data.
But you can't scrape ryanair's website because they willingly put counter measures in place (e.g. captchas) so you cant do that.
Could the google bot take a captcha it finds and use it in one of it's own re-captchas? Essentially passing the burden of deciphering the text onto some unsuspecting human, it will be able to beat all captchas with ease!
"I'm on it, riffraff." "I've found the cheapest flight between lisbon and kiev. Booking is possible thru ryanair.com . I've filled in all necessary details for you, however there is a captcha I can't wrap my cpu around. Also, there are some privacy agreements I'm not authorized to make for you. Could you take over from here?"
Imagine an integrated Siri with those kind of capabilities. It doesn't have to be fully automatic. Letting a secretary do stuff also isn't fully automatic, (s)he's there to optimize your time into doing only the important decisions (sign on agreements, clicking confirm after having seen the price..).
Once bots get smart enough there will be no captchas that can stop them. The only way will be to ban the IP where the bot is coming from, assuming you know which IP belongs to which bots. They could easily disguise themselves by using proxies.
I guess my point is that if we get to the point were a bot can do generic requests without the aid of a human a captchas will probably not be able to stop it.
You're assuming Google would do that and/or that it will be allowed to do that once sites find out. They are a lot of businesses who have zero incentive to give their data to Google.
This "AI" is just scrapping and replacing wikipedia while serving ads.
There is a bunch of data that google can use[1] because it is made explicitly available. But many sources don't want that.
As an example, consider "book me flights for the cheapest route between lisbon and kiev". It is a trivial thing to do, provided you can get airline data.
But you can't scrape ryanair's website because they willingly put counter measures in place (e.g. captchas) so you cant do that.
[1] e.g. http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/