Philosophy, Brain Studies, and the Value of Curiosity

An op-ed about curiosity published in the New York Times yesterday will resonate with many philosophers. Angela Palmer, Self-Portrait (scans engraved on glass) Written by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist at King’s College London, it uses the example of AI-generated answers to internet search queries as a launch point to discuss how we learn in the time between when we form a question and find an answer to it. Google’s AI answers are fast, even if they are often wanting in quality. But suppose its answers were better. Le Cunff asks, “Could there be anything wrong with getting a reliable answer more quickly?” She answers: “There is. By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity—and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world.” She writes: “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…