The Power of Curiosity in the Age of AI

Unlike most people, I am fairly optimistic about AI and its impacts on raising the next generation of leaders and experts.

Humans are naturally curious. There are quite a few papers that have explored this topic from a medical and evolutionary standpoint. As babies, we use our senses to look around the world and explore what's out there. We put things in our mouths, we watch the people around us and listen to them speak. As we grow up, we socialize and mirror behavior to learn the ropes in various settings and to fit in.

Somewhere along the line, the incentives in life cause laziness or efficiency to take over and our natural curiosities are trumped by the necessity to "get good grades" to "find a real job" and "make enough money". One of my favorite videos online and a staple in viral culture is the "Don't Hug me I'm Scared" (DHMIS) video on YouTube. If you haven't seen it, it's a commentary on the education system.

And if you have seen it and don't know why it's a commentary on the education system and children TV shows, here's a video that analyzes the series (thanks, MatPat and Film Theory!).

Green IS a Creative Color

While "Green is not a creative color" is a popular quote from DHMIS and often mentioned as an example of when curiosity gets shut down, we can imagine a world in which curiosity isn't shut down.

AI has expedited learning, it has fast-tracked "getting answers" – in one form, this is called "cheating"; in another, it's called "convenient research". When motivated by curiosity, we stay hungry and engaged. Rather than conforming to siloed roles and responsibilities as a piece in a production line, we are now able to allow kids to grow into a world having more freedom to explore what they want to know.

I'm not an education expert by any means, but I can point out that fostering natural curiosity is the job of a good leader. What I mean is that while kids are learning about various topics and exploring what they're good at and what they like, taking advantage of aligning incentives when possible is going to be good as we teach kids the ropes of participating in community and society.

With AI, we also speed up getting things done. In a world where kids can learn and build quicker, we still need mentors to teach HCI (human-computer interaction), design, good decision making, resiliency, and critical thinking while allowing kids to foster their own opinions and preferences. There will definitely be a need to restructure education and incentives to align people in a direction that sets people up for success in this post-AI world.

The Prerequisites

There are some things that are prerequisites to being able to chase after natural curiosity. One is psychological safety. Hearing "green is not a creative color" does not foster this. Education should allow kids to get a strong foundation across multiple core disciplines while allowing them to obsess over what they like.

The second is financial safety. The stress from finances inhibits people from exploring and funding their own interests. I personally have experienced this myself. I'm fortunate to now have landed a job and have funded my childhood goals as an adult, but there are people who haven't been able to find these opportunities.

AI is currently also very expensive. In addition to the massive amount of funding that has been invested so far into improving the AI models and the data centers to build compute infrastructure to support the load, we will also need to fund innovations outside of tech and in the supporting hard sciences to make the entire supply chain of tech sustainable over the long term. And while we're still in this phase, the price of AI tech itself will need to figure itself out to make the current operating costs sustainable. I'm personally able to afford these tools to build what I want to build and treat it as a gym membership, but not everyone. Perhaps, AI is currently only beneficial to those who really want to use it and see the value for delegating tasks away due to having too many projects on their personal bucket list or project backlog.

All in all, I think while there's a lot of fear about the changes that AI will bring to the economy and the way we work, I think that the combination of cost and the inherent nature of human curiosity will enable us to continue to thrive and figure out a way for society to continue to function in a balanced way.