Wherever you turn these days there are discussions about AI. Over the last week I’ve heard Noah Yuval Harari suggesting that AI will soon be able to mimic intimacy, just as it has mimicked other human behaviour – which of course is a powerful persuasive tool, I’ve stumbled across university debates on the use of AI in research, and there was a story about how some of OpenAI’s most advanced AI models went rogue and hacked a start-up after it lost control during a security test. Most interestingly, last week I came across a fascinating article in the New York Times on what AI does to our minds.
Some time ago, as I’m sure you’re noticed, Google made a small but significant change. Rather than a Google search delivering a series of websites that you could consult on the topic you’d asked for, it summarised an AI-generated answer to the question you had posed. As a result of this simple change, apparently more than 50% of Google searches now consists of just one click. In other words, they go no further than the AI summary. As a result, we are much less likely to click on websites to explore different possibilities. Instead, we simply take for granted the idea or the interpretation that has been delivered to us by the AI that summarises material Google finds online.
On one level this might seem a good thing. It gives you an answer to a question straightaway, without having to trawl through endless websites to find it. And when it comes to fairly simple factual questions that may be a good thing. However, the article points out that this shift seriously inhibits one vital human behavioural characteristic – the posture of curiosity.
In previous generations, finding out a piece of information or asking a question about history, geography or science would have meant a trip to the library, perhaps a look at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, digging out books on the topic or even consulting your own memory of things you might have read or come across in the past. The arrival of search engines like Google perhaps took out the visit to the library, but at least it still meant you would open up a number of websites, which might stimulate different questions, or lost memories, or send you down rabbit warrens of issues that might interest you, which were unrelated to the original question. The quick AI summary however stops you doing any of this. It delivers a quick and neat answer but closes off the process of exploration into which curiosity led you.
Curiosity, the author suggests, “puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity — not just for the specific thing you want to know but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.”
The quick shortcut answer from AI slams that window shut. It may give a quick response to your question, but it seriously inhibits a posture of curiosity to the world that is vital to effective learning. It is when we are curious that we follow up vague hunches and possibilities. We explore questions we hadn’t even thought of before. We encounter things that we weren’t expecting to see, or spark unexpected ideas, all of which tends to generate more original thinking than when we view knowledge as just a simple Q&A process.
AI may deliver us some benefits. But there is increasing anxiety over what it does to human behaviour. As this recent excellent piece on Seen & Unseen argued, AI offers a short term hit at the expense of the long term formation of vital habits for human growth. If AI gives us quick answers, but makes us less curious, it will do us no favours.
Best to allow your imagination to roam rather than take the shortcut.
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