Article by Anne-Laure Le Cunff: “More than 60 percent of Google searches in the United States now end without the user clicking on a link. We type a question, read an artificial-intelligence-generated summary of the results and leave with our answer.
Google is hardly alone. Claude, ChatGPT and upstart competitors like Perplexity do roughly the same thing: They take a question and swiftly return an answer, compressing what used to be a meandering journey through the internet into an immediate arrival at your destination. The explorative phase of searches — clicking through links, stumbling onto unexpected pages, following a reference that leads to somewhere unplanned — is disappearing.
For anyone who publishes on the internet, this is a troubling development, since it lowers website traffic and makes protecting and profiting from your intellectual property more difficult. But you might think it is good news for internet users. Could there be anything wrong with getting a reliable answer more quickly?
There is. By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity — and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world.
About a decade ago, I worked at Google. When I was there, we often measured the value of internet content based on factors that indicated user engagement, like clicks and scroll depth. The metric Google seemed to reward — people exploring — is precisely what its A.I. products are now designed to eliminate.
I left Google to study neuroscience, and what I found in the research literature helps explain why the A.I. summary poses a danger to learning. Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out.
Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help create memories. Similar findings have been reported by other researchers in studies involving infants, older children and adults.
In short, curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity — not just for the specific thing you want to know but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board…(More)”.
