Biju Dominic keeps coming back to the same idea: we’re becoming less curious.
His analogy is simple. Think of a librarian anywhere in the world–they had the most access to knowledge but the librarian was rarely the most well-read person in the room. Someone from outside would come in and read more than the person with easy access to the books.
Dominic, author of the recently published Microstimuli and chief evangelist at Fractal Analytics, calls this the ‘Librarian’s Paradox’. Abundance, he says, breeds a peculiar kind of intellectual complacency.
For generations, you had to forage through a library to acquire knowledge, he says. Even when the internet became all-pervasive, that friction remained. You still had to know how to search and know where to look. But with Generative AI, that friction has collapsed. The economic cost of acquiring an answer is now near zero. In turn, this has introduced a strange new pathology into the modern workflow: cognitive satiety.
What does this mean? When a system is constantly fed, it stops feeling hungry. It means when we are surrounded by knowledge and the friction to acquire it drops to zero, the desire to possess it vanishes too. Which is why Dominic makes that case that as AI makes its presence felt, most of humanity will simply stop the pursuit of knowledge.
Are we then headed towards mass stupidity? Not yet, he says. “The decline isn’t in cognitive abilities,” Dominic says. “It’s in curiosity. That’s the shift. “Younger people are worse at searching for answers than the previous generations, not because they’re less capable but because they believe the answer will always be there when they need it. Why dig when Google will get it for you in a few seconds? Why read a book when an AI summary will give you the key points in twenty seconds?
The 600-million-year-old human brain hasn’t suddenly rewired its internal algorithms just because a new software update has arrived. What is atrophying is not cognitive capability. It is the cognitive drive.
Dominic points to what we need next, pointing to the works of Columbia University professor Stuart Firestein on the “culture of ignorance.” Firestein taught neurobiology at Columbia. After one course, his students told him they “knew all about the brain.” Firestein asked himself, “How can anyone attend a few lectures, read two books, and claim to know all about the brain?” So, he stopped teaching that course and started a seminar dedicated purely to ignorance instead.
That’s what we need now, Dominic says. Create a feeling of ignorance. The ‘what’ can be answered by data. But getting to the ‘why’ is where the real knowledge is. This is because the structural limitation of generative AI is that it is fundamentally a probabilistic machine. It is engineered to analyse historical data and predict the most statistically probable next word, concept, or trend. But genuine human creativity does not live in the comfortable, predictable, middle of a curve. It exists on chaotic, highly improbable extremes.
But to get to those extremes, people must get comfortable with asking questions. And what happens to a society when curiosity becomes optional? When the effort to learn begins to taper off?
In 1900, a mathematician named David Hilbert stood before a global conference in Paris. He didn’t give them answers. He gave them 23 provocative, unresolved, and deeply difficult questions. To this day, not all those questions have been solved.
He didn’t give people the knowledge of math. He gave people interested in contemporary math a direction. He gave them hunger. “It’s unclear if that kind of hunger can be built by anyone who is interested in the subject,” Dominic argues. AI will get better at answering. It will get faster, cheaper, and more confident. But it won’t be able to ask the questions that matter. And it’s the only part that has value and will continue to have value.
The risk is clear. It is not that we’ll become stupid. The risk is that we’ll stop trying.
And that’s the part no machine can fix for us.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)