#32. Weekly AI For Newsroom Roundup. Are we losing curiosity and the desire to discover?

Hello, this is Sergei. Today, this newsletter is a bit more personal. It’s about my personal fear of the future.

This week, I had a conversation with my son. He’s 16 now, so he’s at that age when it’s time to start thinking seriously about the future. We talked about his friends at school and the guys he plays CS with. And it struck me that we’re all — both our kids and ourselves — slowly losing two of the most important things humans have: curiosity and the ability (and desire!) to discover things.

We don’t really need to discover anything anymore — algorithms do it for us. And I think that’s the core reason why we’re losing our curiosity: we no longer need it. Social media shows us what it thinks we want, and we react with, “Oh, cool!” We don’t have that itch to go looking for something new because that “something new” is already waiting in our feeds. But it only feels like we’ve discovered it. We haven’t actually.

Those of us in our late 30s and 40s had the chance to experience that curiosity. Our kids, I’m afraid, haven’t had the opportunity to feel that beautiful itch at its full scale. And I wonder: what happens if curiosity and the desire to discover slowly disappear?

How does AI fit into this? I have no idea. But at this stage, AI doesn’t seem to help. We use it to consume slop and generate even more slop. Sometimes I wish someone could go back in time and remove the word “generative” from everything we’ve been calling AI over the past few years.