From a well-being/philosophical standpoint, maybe it's better to live life relaxed, and not one where you have to micro-manage every minute of your day to squeeze out every inch and penny of efficiency you can. That sounds like a horrible lifestyle, but I guess to each their own :)

I imagine physicists got very excited with things like the ultraviolet catastrophe, and the irreconcilable nature of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It's these mysteries that keep the world exciting.

I selected several different voices, but it only generated between 2 and 11 seconds. Only got up to the first sentence...

I think we are forgetting that Google suffers from these problems too. A human who asks bad questions will continue to ask bad questions. AI should in general be trained to do what the human wants. If the human wants something stupid, that's on the human. Google also isn't guaranteed to find the right information you're looking for, especially if it is on an obscure topic or if the query is highly overloaded or being taken over by current trends.

I am not sure if neural networks have been trained to do this yet, but it would be very cool to see a network that produces both generated output and the most relevant input data that led to that output, by somehow keeping track of the influence certain inputs have on various learned features and internal structure of the network. I think of this as an index.

You make a good point about SEO. SEO is going to be obsolete in the near future. The SEO game is basically an adversarial attack on Google, which Google itself actually promotes and encourages website builders to do! In the future, we are going to look back on the cat-and-mouse game of SEO and see it as primitive and antithetical to the goal of search.

As per your example, nobody currently uses Google as a way to draft letters, but rather as a way to learn how to draft letters. I think the distinction is pretty key in understanding the difference between the two problem spaces. I would think that "write me a letter" is a problem that isn't in Google's domain. I do not think synthesis engines will necessarily replace search engines, but the two will both be useful.

The premise of Google's interaction design is that you will be taken to an external resource. Google in recent years has started adding widgets and blurbs at the top of the search results for common things like stocks, covid-cases chart, weather, etc. but this synthesized content isn't their primary focus and are likely hard-coded to a large extent.