As I continued to use AI in every aspect of my daily life, there was one thing I was losing in the process. Curiosity. I can't state the exact point of time when this change occurred, but in the process, we lost the ability to brainstorm, to ideate, to think differently. I feel we fail to understand that changes don't have to be visible in order for them to take effect.

"Curiosity, the desire to learn or know about anything."

To justify this hypothesis of mine, it's important to look at the problem holistically. As an individual who directly works with AI & technology, it's important to understand how AI is impacting other types of industries & individuals, outside of the "bubble". Before diving into several different perspectives, it's important to understand what AI actually is, fundamentally. It consists of data, algorithms & neural networks, but at its core, it's an optimisation problem.

An optimisation problem is the problem of finding the best possible solution from the set of all feasible solutions. The next question on your mind should be "How does AI decide what the best solution is?". It's a prediction. It statistically evaluates which word is most likely to come next based on patterns it identifies & the data it was trained on.

Now knowing that, let's understand exactly how it's replacing human curiosity. Let's take an example of a young individual aspiring to start their own business. They would go on to AI and search something along the lines of "Top 10 businesses to start" or "Most profitable businesses to earn passive income". The AI processes this input, checks its data (and the internet if it has search capabilities) and derives an output. What's the problem?

AI does not account for information decay. There could be hundreds if not thousands of individuals who received the same output. Every time this output was shown, the value of the idea decreased. From an economics standpoint, if all of those individuals started a business based on the same idea, it would lead to a supply surplus. The rate at which supply grows may be higher than the rate of demand because the market is already oversaturated.

Individuals are replacing curiosity with AI and they don't even realise it. A study from MIT Media Lab found that there was strong variability in individuals' essays when using only their brains as compared to statistically homogenous essays when using LLMs. This is also referred to as "AI Slop", any content which is lacking in effort or quality, and currently, there's a lot of it. In fact, there's so much AI Slop out there that the AI companies themselves are buying millions of books to avoid degrading the quality of their AI models, a full circle moment.

William James called curiosity the impulse towards better cognition. Curiosity led to the discovery of penicillin (to fight infectious diseases), pasteurization (preservation of dairy products) and the world wide web (what we're on right now), discoveries that we now consider normal in our everyday lives. NASA had an essay writing contest to determine the name of the next Mars rover. The winning name was Curiosity, and Clara Ma (the winner) wrote in the essay "Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives".

In a world where intelligence is available to the masses yet instant gratification supersedes curiosity, we should strive to create an impact & pursue knowledge, not consume it. By outsourcing the solution, are we being more productive or heading towards problem-solving atrophy?