I Mentioned AI, and She Shut Down
A conversation with a friend this weekend left me thinking about how quickly we decide what we believe.
We were catching up after not speaking for a while, and she was telling me about an incredibly difficult year. There had been loss, family issues, legal problems, real estate problems, one complicated situation after another. I could relate to some of what she was describing because this past year I’ve also found myself navigating situations I had never dealt with before, the kind where you don’t even know enough to know what questions you should be asking. At one point, I mentioned that I had been using AI to help me understand some of those situations, think through my options, and sometimes simply lower my stress enough to make a better decision. Almost immediately, I could feel the conversation change.
It wasn’t that she disagreed with me that stayed with me. I have friends who are skeptical about AI, and I understand many of their concerns. I have plenty of my own. What felt different was the sense that the conclusion had already been reached, as though there wasn’t much left to explore. I found myself wondering about the difference between being cautious about something and deciding what we believe before we’ve really taken the time to understand it.
I think all of us do this in different ways. We hear something about a person, an idea, a technology, a way of living, even a possibility for our own lives, and very quickly decide which category it belongs in, good, bad, safe, dangerous, smart, ridiculous, for me, not for me. Sometimes those judgments protect us. Experience teaches us things, and discernment matters. I certainly don’t think we should approach everything with endless openness or abandon what we already know simply for the sake of being curious. But the more I think about it, the more I see a difference between discernment and certainty. Discernment can say, “I have concerns, and I want to understand this better,” while certainty can say, “I already know enough.”
Maybe that difference matters more than we realize right now because so much around us is changing. AI is one obvious example, but it certainly isn’t the only one. The way we work is changing, the way children learn is changing, entire industries are shifting, and we are constantly being asked to form opinions about things that are evolving faster than most of us can fully understand.
At the same time, I wonder whether the way we consume information is making curiosity harder. So much of what we see through social media, search engines, and even the news is shaped by what we already click on, watch, follow, and engage with. The more we interact with a certain perspective, the more likely we are to see more of that same perspective. Before long, without necessarily realizing it, we can end up in a loop where the things we already believe keep being reinforced.
There is something comfortable about that. When our feeds continually reflect our own worldview back to us, it becomes easier to assume that our perspective is simply the obvious one. We may have fewer reasons to seek out ideas that challenge us, or to wonder whether someone who sees something differently might know something we don’t. It doesn’t mean their view is right or that ours is wrong, but there may still be something useful in understanding how they arrived there.
Curiosity asks something different of us. It asks us to stay in that slightly uncomfortable space between knowing and not knowing, to ask another question, listen to someone whose experience is different from ours, test something rather than immediately accept or reject it, and sometimes change our minds. Changing our minds can feel as though we were wrong before, when perhaps what it really means is that we learned something new and can now make a more informed decision.
That is part of what interests me so much about AI. I don’t want to blindly trust it, and I don’t want to blindly reject it. I want to understand it well enough to decide where it is useful, where I need to be cautious, what I want it to help me with, and what I don’t want to hand over. I’m much more interested in learning how to use it intentionally than deciding that it belongs entirely in the category of either good or bad.
And maybe that same approach applies to far more than technology. Curiosity doesn’t mean believing everything we hear or constantly changing our opinions. We may look more closely at something and still arrive at exactly the same conclusion. The difference is that we’ve examined it. We’ve asked questions. We’ve allowed ourselves to see whether there is anything we might be missing.
In this week’s short episode of The Courage to Be, I explore this from another angle, including the conversation with my friend, something I recently heard that made me think differently about whether AI itself is really the issue, and research that has made me pay closer attention to what happens when we allow technology to do too much of our thinking for us.
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🎙️ Listen on Apple Podcast.
The more I sit with all of this, the less I think this is simply a conversation about AI. I think it is also about how willing we are to remain curious in a world that makes it very easy to reinforce what we already believe. Maybe curiosity doesn’t always lead us somewhere new, but it gives us the chance to make our choices with more awareness instead of simply repeating what we already thought.
I’ve been wondering where in my own life I may have become certain without realizing it. Is there something you’ve already made your mind up about that might be worth becoming curious about again?
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