COUNTING LOSSES
To be sure, nobody is forced to use these tools. People can still browse and wander, still follow a chain of links into unfamiliar territory. But the default architecture of our digital platforms will make this less likely.
Unlike other social costs of technological design – for instance, the addictive behaviors fostered by the infinite scroll on social media feeds – the loss of open-ended curiosity is not going to spur a class-action lawsuit against tech companies or inspire regulators to intervene. AI companies that want to do right by their users will have to take action themselves.
Instead of burying sources behind paraphrases and replacing 10 links with one summary, they could make different design choices. They could keep sources more visible. They could show competing explanations, instead of compressing them into one smooth paragraph. They could offer alternative search modes that reward exploration over speed.
I hope my former colleagues at Google and the engineers building similar tools elsewhere take these suggestions to heart, and that the industry develops best practices that protect curiosity rather than treating it as an afterthought. The space between a question and an answer has value, and that value should not be engineered away.
The most important discoveries are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that delivers only what is asked for, we will lose the capacity to discover what we didn’t know to ask.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. She is the author of “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
