How about “idle musings” or “sense of wonder”, rather than “curiosity”? I remember a time before I had instant access to google whenever I had a question. Back then, a thought of “I wonder why X” was not immediately followed by googling “why X”, but sometimes instead followed by thinking about X (incl. via “shower thoughts”), daydreaming about X, looking up X in a book, etc. It’s not exactly bad that we have search engines and LLMs nowadays, but for me it does feel like something was lost, too.
Exactly. But then what does “curiosity” signal? Not laziness (as suggested in the post), but the opposite, right? Just asking seems the lazier version.
Compare to asking your colleague something that could be found by 10 seconds of googling. These days, you are supposed to google first. In ten years, you will be supposed to ask an AI for the explanation first, which for many people will also be the last step; and for the more curious ones the expected second and third steps will be something like “try a different prompt”, “ask additional questions”, “switch to a different AI”, etc.
“But nowadays curiosity was déclassé. It suggested laziness (why not just ask it?)…”
I think that does not work. Asking is easy, so asking is the lazy option.
How about “idle musings” or “sense of wonder”, rather than “curiosity”? I remember a time before I had instant access to google whenever I had a question. Back then, a thought of “I wonder why X” was not immediately followed by googling “why X”, but sometimes instead followed by thinking about X (incl. via “shower thoughts”), daydreaming about X, looking up X in a book, etc. It’s not exactly bad that we have search engines and LLMs nowadays, but for me it does feel like something was lost, too.
Exactly. But then what does “curiosity” signal? Not laziness (as suggested in the post), but the opposite, right? Just asking seems the lazier version.
Compare to asking your colleague something that could be found by 10 seconds of googling. These days, you are supposed to google first. In ten years, you will be supposed to ask an AI for the explanation first, which for many people will also be the last step; and for the more curious ones the expected second and third steps will be something like “try a different prompt”, “ask additional questions”, “switch to a different AI”, etc.