The Next Decade Belongs to the Curious, Not the Certain

Discovery, Exploration, Curiosity

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI is going to shape our behavior.

As AI gets better at giving us instant, perfect answers, I keep asking myself, do we question and scrutinize the answers enough?

I recently came across a paper from MIT, AI and Social Media: A Political Economy Perspective, that really stuck with me. It argues that AI-driven recommendation systems and ad models intensify filter bubbles and echo chambers, especially when platforms compete for attention.

In simple terms: the more the system optimizes for engagement, the more it rewards certainty.

That line hit me hard.

Because the internet used to feel different.

I used to fall down rabbit holes on YouTube, end up reading about black holes after watching a cooking video, or discover a random creator who completely changed how I saw something.

Now it feels like everyone’s already made up their mind.

You can see it in every feed, politics that look like sports teams, threads full of hot takes, even product debates that sound like fan wars.

Somewhere along the way, we started rewarding certainty over curiosity.

The stronger the opinion, the better it performs.

The louder the take, the faster it spreads.

The algorithm loves confidence, not questions.

I get it. Certainty feels good.

It’s safe. It gets applause.

But too much of it turns into tribes of absolutes.

Everyone sure they’re right, no one really learning.

Curiosity breaks that loop.

It’s the instinct to click on something you don’t already agree with.

To ask “what if I’m wrong?” or “what if there’s more here?”

It’s what leads to empathy, creativity, and better ideas.

The truth is, this isn’t just a mindset problem.

It’s a design and incentive problem.

If we want curiosity to thrive again, we need new systems, products that make exploration feel rewarding, not risky.

That’s the challenge I’m most excited about: building technology that brings curiosity back.

The future will belong to the people, and the platforms, that make it easy to stay curious. And tbh, the success of the society and our collective sanity depends on it.