The Importance of Curiosity

Cultivating inquisitiveness is essential for human well-being. People who regularly make efforts to develop their curiosity tend to be smarter, more creative, and more successful than their less curious counterparts. They tend to be more satisfied and successful in their careers, and are also associated with lower anxiety, emotional stability, self-esteem, persistence, conscientiousness, and openness to new experiences.

Source: cdn2.psychologytoday.com

Philosophers such as Aristotle and Nietzsche have long exhorted people to cultivate the virtue of curiosity. In recent years, one writer has even referred to it as a ‘kind of superpower’. The benefits of curiosity are numerous, and it is essential that we prioritize its development.

The Impact of AI Assistants on Curiosity

However, the design and use of AI assistants are arguably destroying our digital opportunities to cultivate curiosity. A predominant psychology theory of how curiosity works suggests that we are hard-wired to seek information because of ‘knowledge gaps’ between what we know and what we want to find out. This cognitive process is connected to the brain’s reward system, and waiting for sought-out information activates the reward circuitry and enhances memory-making.

But AI summaries, such as Google’s Overview, can short-circuit that process before it even begins. Silicon Valley pushes the idea that immediacy and completeness are virtues of their large language model-based tools. In fact, those features are likely strangling our inquisitiveness.

‘Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board,’ writes neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff. ‘When an AI summary answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen.’ This means that you get what you came for, but you also lose what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no obvious relationship.

Le Cunff warns that AI designers foolishly see the knowledge gap as something to be ‘engineered away’ in the service of expediency and engagement, rather than the critical space for human flourishing that it is. Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens.

In addition to the worries of harmful cognitive de-skilling and manipulation, AI assistants may be threatening even more fundamental cognitive processes. It is not enough for tech leaders to roll out and then foist upon us cool, personable generative AI tools that have been single-mindedly optimized for short-term utilitarian goals and increased market share. Responsible design and use of AI assistants demands that we become much more deliberative and mindful of how an interface can fail to align with important human capacities, including curiosity.

We must spend more time and energy on ensuring that our technologies support or even advance human capacities, and not displace or diminish them. AI assistants should be better at ‘scaffolding’ responses, highlighting competing or conflicting sources and, as Le Cunff suggests, they should ‘offer alternative search modes that reward exploration over speed.’

Ultimately, the quiet destruction of curiosity by AI assistants is a threat to human flourishing. We must prioritize the development of curiosity and ensure that our technologies support, rather than hinder, this essential human capacity.

The Way Forward

So, what can we do to address this issue? Firstly, we must recognize the importance of curiosity and prioritize its development. We can do this by encouraging critical thinking, creativity, and exploration in our children and ourselves. We must also be mindful of how we use AI assistants and ensure that they are aligned with our values and goals.

Secondly, we must demand better design and use of AI assistants. We must push for AI assistants that are better at ‘scaffolding’ responses, highlighting competing or conflicting sources, and offering alternative search modes that reward exploration over speed. We must also ensure that AI assistants are transparent and explainable, so that we can understand how they are making decisions and recommendations.

Finally, we must prioritize human flourishing over short-term utilitarian goals and increased market share. We must recognize that our technologies have the power to either support or hinder human flourishing, and we must use that power responsibly.

By prioritizing curiosity and ensuring that our technologies support human flourishing, we can create a brighter future for ourselves and for generations to come.