Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘I left Google to study neuroscience, and what I found in the research literature helps explain why the A.I. summary poses a danger to learning. Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out.

Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that same study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help form new memories. Similar findings have been reported by other researchers in studies involving infants, older children and adults.

In short, curiosity 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.

But the window stays open only as long as the question remains unanswered. When an A.I. answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You got what you came for, but you also lost 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.

Researchers call this incidental learning, and it’s the mechanism behind many serendipitous discoveries. Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information. They emerge from periods of undirected exploration, when people follow questions further than they need to and find things they weren’t expecting. When the physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected a persistent hiss in their radio antenna in 1964, they could have written it off as equipment noise; instead, they kept asking what it might be, and they ended up discovering the radiation left over from the Big Bang.

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. The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints. The loss is not serious in any single case. But fewer detours and fewer unexpected discoveries will have a cumulative effect. Over time, people trained this way become better at extracting ready-made conclusions than building connections of their own.’ (from the New York Times)