The AI Revolution rewards the curious

A few years ago, if you had a direct and specific ask or clarification about a concept or book or otherwise, your best bet was hounding over articles and PDFs until something finally made sense. There was no way to get a direct understandable answer unless you had easy access to an expert individual who also happened to be very patient. In other words, it was impossible.

But the good thing about AI is that it is essentially search engine who roleplays as an expert individual who is forced to be very patient. It’s not perfect — since it is a search engine, its subject to the same holes and hallucinations that real search results can give you — but its a much better interface for exploring knowledge than the old method of searching keywords and hoping they lead you to websites that will give you better insight.

In particular, there’s two improvements that chatbots give: the ability to synthesize information from many places, and the ability to describe that information in ways that help the user. This sort of natural language processing really didn’t exist in the search engine era.

Which brings me to my title: the AI revolution rewards the curious.

There was a greater barrier to being curious in the era of search. Now, if you really want to learn something — ranging from how quantum physics works to why the sky is blue — you have a true, dedicated expert in your pocket that can always explain it in a way that makes sense to you.

The only thing it can’t give you is that sense of curiosity.

So now, people who are deeply curious are also going to grow a sizable knowledge gap over people who aren’t. They already had this, thanks to things like reading and research and building, but there was still enough friction then that more pragmatic folks — who would simply learn in order to do good in their job — would still be able to catch up. In other words, a person who spins a couple of wheels here and there have historically not done as well as people who follow The Formula, going into Harvard and getting a job at a consulting company. Now, its not so clear — the wheels don’t just spin, they go much further, and now someone can create an entire company simply based on the information they learn from their new AI-based web search tutor, potentially improving their profits by 10-25x those who just follow the old school way of doing things.

The AI Revolution rewards the curious.

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