Tagged provenance · show all articles
Two axes decide what retrieval-augmented generation becomes by 2035: whether evidence-gathering stays a separate, inspectable step, and whether what it returns can be verified. Crossing them gives four futures, and current evidence does not yet pick one.
Writing appears first as an accounting technology, and everything after it — carriers, copying, printing, pagination, archives — is an argument about how a record earns the right to be believed without its author standing beside it.
A starter culture is a population propagated from itself. It runs indefinitely if it is fed and managed, and it drifts or dies if it is only ever fed its own unmanaged output. Synthetic training data behaves the same way.
Herbert Simon named the constraint in 1971. The binding cost is not making a claim but checking one — and the institutions that historically absorbed that shift are the story, not the technology.