What Happens When No One is Curious?

When we reach the "end of our exploring" and we don't arrive where we started from

Photo by Justin Heap on Unsplash

Former Google employee and current neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff has published a chilling article at the New York Times on Google’s shift from giving links to search queries to offering AI summaries. You may not have thought much about this shift, but it’s radical and is changing how many people perceive the world. Google has 91% of the search market share. This is how people get their questions answered (although increasingly they will turn to AI—more on that in a minute). In the past, Google didn’t give you answers to your questions, they offered up links which may contain various possible answers. You may find several links to Reddit where people offer various answers. You may find a Wikipedia site. You may find scholarly sources. You may find government sources. You may find commercial sources. You may find all kinds of information. It was up to you to sift through the information, ascertain what was relevant, and apply it. This process was an exercise for your mind, gave you depth of context, and—most important to this article—sparked your curiosity. You discovered all kinds of related articles and information related to the topic that you were unaware of. You may have gone looking for when Hemingway wrote The Old Man and The Sea but you came away learning that some scholars believe that concussions he received from multiple planes crash contributed to his suicide. The world is stranger than you imagined. But what happens when AI summaries answer our questions directly, cutting out the path of exploration? Here’s what Le Cunff writes:

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.

I worry about this, deeply. I worry about a culture that is illiterate, distracted, and incurious. As Christians, we have an obligation to attend to the wondrous world that God has created. Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” God has concealed his glory in all of creation, in the works of humanity, in the faces of people, in the natural world. And it is our glory to search things out, to discover and to give him glory. This kind of curiosity should not be confused with curiositas, which I have written about before. I’m speaking about a healthy, God-honoring curiosity about what God has made and worked through humans.

When I was in graduate school and we were all relying on databases to find books and articles, I had a professor who urged us to go to the library and “dig through the stacks.” Their reasoning was that while the databases might be helpful for finding things we knew to look for (direct answers), our curiosity would allow us to discover interesting related sources if we dug around through physical books. They were right. And the same is true for online searches today. When Google chooses to spit out AI generated summaries, we aren’t getting to “dig through the stacks.” We are losing touch with information. We are one more step removed from information itself.

Le Cunff points out why this is a serious problem:

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.

I fear that the result will be people who think they are curious (“What was the name of that actor?”) but who are only curious in the most shallow, factual sense. Their curiosity is only for the immediate question, not for the world of wonder surrounding their question that has led scientists, artists, poets, philosophers, and theologians to great works.

I also fear that this, combined with an illiterate culture, will make society incredibly susceptible to propaganda. Whoever controls the filters that produce the AI summaries controls the answers that people accept. We already see this happening with “Grok” on Twitter all the time. Someone will post something and a user will swoop in and ask Grok to fact check it live. And often Grok is wrong, but the user will believe the AI over reality. Why? Because AI seems objective and mathematical. As people grow more comfortable with AI, people will turn to Claude and ChatGPT with their search questions instead of Google, and we will have the same problem: answers instead of exploration. The implications for democracy are unsettling.

Even more unsettling is the implications for our spiritual life. Serendipity is a gift from God. And we lose it when we try to efficiently answer all our questions rather than wrestling with words and meaning. In T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, he writes:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

But AI’s goal is to help us cease from our exploring. To allow the machine to explore for us. And the end of our exploring is not, in this case, to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time—a deeper awareness of our human dependence on God—but a deeper dependence upon the machine.

When David sat under the stars and marveled at all God had made and the psalms poured out of him, he was curious. He wondered about who this Creator might be who could make the mighty mountains and rain and provide for all creation. Do we have that kind of attention anymore? Do we have the space for those questions? And if we did ask those questions today, would we expect an AI summary and move on, or would our hearts be filled with God’s grandeur and break out in poetry?

These questions are not hypothetical. They have direct implications on how we treat one another. If we do not cultivate a healthy curiosity, a loving-wonder about other people then when we meet them we will treat them selfishly, instrumentally. We will look for what we can get out of them, how we can use them, and then move on. We will treat them as machines. If we attend to them with curiosity, acknowledging the wonder that they were created by God, then we will never cease in our exploring. We’ll always have interesting questions to ask them because they matter before God.

Google AI summaries are not the end of curiosity by themselves. But they are part of a larger trend in our society to circumvent our imaginative exploration and efficiently answer our questions so we can keep the world moving toward consumption and production. The question for us comes from Wendell Berry: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” God calls us to live human lives, lives of curiosity about his creation. Let’s imagine.

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