Context is important. For a general question-answering bot, you have to synthesize information and make a decision. The answer to a question posed by my uncle o

Context is important. For a general question-answering bot, you have to synthesize information and make a decision. The answer to a question posed by my uncle on Facebook isn't necessarily the same as the answer to that question posed by an audience member at a talk I'm giving at an academic conference. In the latter case, there's an enormous shared understanding that lets us skip the basic-agreed-upon facts and get right to the nuance. My uncle doesn't need nuance. He needs to know whether climate change is a Chinese conspiracy or vaccines cause autism. Minority opinions are sometimes the thing that advances the species, but that's a job for a time and place that isn't "answering random questions for arbitrary users". The answer to "do mermaids exist" is "no". It just is. That doesn't preclude a group of 200 experts devoting their research careers to investigating the question, and if they happen to prove otherwise, then we alter the textbooks and move on. Ideally, Google would then start answering "yes" instead. But if you want to be that world's dominant authority at answering questions, you can't just always say "well, it's complicated. People disagree. The world is a complex place and the definitions of terms and the facts are in flux", because you're no longer answering a question.