Human Curiosity in the Age of AI

Glasp’s Note: Today, we’re excited to welcome neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff for this guest post. Anne-Laure studies what she calls “curiosity-driven intelligence” – the architecture behind why we seek, and how this system can be tuned or disrupted. You might remember her from her Glasp Talk. Through research, writing, and experimentation, she explores how curiosity intersects with neuroscience, psychology, and technology – including her newsletter at Ness Labs and her studies on hypercuriosity and AI-assisted learning at the ADHD Research Lab of King’s College London – spanning both the theoretical and the applied, asking how we might better understand and leverage our drive to know. Her book, Tiny Experiments, is a practical guide for living a more experimental life.

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In an era where AI can generate answers in milliseconds, human curiosity might seem obsolete. Yet paradoxically, as machines become more capable of answering our questions, our ability to ask meaningful ones becomes increasingly precious.

The uniquely human trait of curiosity – that restless, insatiable drive to explore beyond the known – may be our most valuable asset in the age of AI.

AI versus Human Curiosity

For most of human history, information was scarce and hard-won. Our ancestors’ curiosity drove them to map uncharted territories, decode natural phenomena, and preserve knowledge through generations.

Today, we face the opposite challenge: information overload. We’re bombarded with more content than any human could possibly process, which creates anxiety, overwhelm, and confusion.

This is where AI can come to the rescue. AI systems excel at organizing, summarizing, and generating content based on vast datasets of human knowledge. For instance, as a neuroscientist, I’m excited about AI’s ability to identify patterns across thousands of datasets, suggesting connections between neurological pathways that might otherwise take decades to discover.

What AI cannot do, however, is feel the emotional and intellectual hunger that drives humans to pursue knowledge for its own sake. The thrill of the intellectual chase remains uniquely ours.

This distinction matters because breakthrough innovations typically emerge not from efficiently processing known information, but from asking the weird questions nobody thought to ask before – the ones that feel a little bit “out there” to most people.

The Curiosity Advantage

As AI handles more routine intellectual tasks, human curiosity becomes our comparative advantage in several key ways.

First, the quality of AI outputs depends entirely on the quality of our inputs. Curious humans who can frame better questions will extract more value from AI tools than those who accept default prompts and standard queries.

Second, human curiosity naturally gravitates toward gaps and inconsistencies in our understanding – precisely the areas where AI systems, trained on existing data, are most likely to fall short. We’ve all had those moments when AI wrote something that sounded good on the surface but we felt instinctively wrong. Our curiosity can serve as a natural error-detection system for AI-generated content.

Perhaps most importantly, human curiosity can help us explore not just what AI can do, but what it should do, ensuring that technological advancement supports human flourishing

As we increasingly delegate information processing to machines, we must deliberately cultivate our curiosity. This means creating space for open-ended exploration in our education systems, workplaces, and personal lives by cultivating an experimental mindset. This means learning in public and valuing questions as much as answers.

The future belongs not to those who build the most powerful AI, but to those who maintain their insatiable human curiosity alongside it. In the age of AI, our most human trait – curiosity – will become our most valuable one.

Learn More

If you’d like to read more about personal experimentation, systematic curiosity, and mindful productivity, subscribe to the weekly Ness Labs newsletter.

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📣 Community Updates by Glasp

• 🟥 Glasp Talk with Anne-Laure Le Cunff:

  Glasp Talk features intimate interviews with luminaries who reveal their emotions, experiences, and stories. The guest, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, is a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and founder of Ness Labs. With a background at Google and a marketing leadership role in tech, Anne-Laure is also a PhD researcher at King’s College London who investigates how neurodiversity, especially ADHD, interacts with AI, curiosity, and learning. She’s the author of Tiny Experiments, a book that encourages people to adopt an experimental mindset in their personal and professional lives.

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