“The more confident you are, the less your own brain is telling you to be curious.” ~ Maggie Jackson

Be honest: how often do you reflexively defer to AI?

What if that same system told you it had some uncertainty about its answers? What would be different, and why?

Author and journalist Maggie Jackson and I dig into what happens when we shuffle the certainty deck and reinsert unsureness in AI, our interactions with it, and our own thinking.

Can we protect our future and own humanity by choosing to be curious — by choosing to be uncertain?

If you’re highly rigid, afraid of the unknown, you like black and white answers — chances are you’ll bring that into your interactions with AI. And then you’re probably going to be blindsided by it, loose sight of its mistakes, or your own.

We explored uncertainty as a root trigger for curiosity, our evolving ideas of what we want from AI, the impact of having humans in the AI mix and vice versa, designing friction and instigations to think, the down sides of “mutual loops of admiration” and “cognitive surrender”, how unsure AI models help provoke curiosity in humans, tolerance of uncertainty as a way to retain independent thinking — and holding on to our cognitive dignity and naked minds.

Listen to Ep. 340: In the Mix: Curiosity, Unsureness and AI, with Maggie Jackson

Maggie Jackson is known for her prescient writings on social trends and technology’s impact on humanity. Her 2023 book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure was nominated for a National Book Award, named a Library Journal Best Book of 2023, and a Nautilus Top Ten Summer Read. Her previous book, Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention was released to similar acclaim.

Enjoy my previous conversation with Maggie Jackson: Curiosity & the Gift of Uncertainty.

Learn more about Jacqueline Gottlieb’s research in these two C2BC conversations: Neuroscience Eyes Curiosity and Curiosity Is Taking Neuroscience to New Frontiers.

And don’t miss this disarming discussion with Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter: Curiosity & Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense.

Check out some of the research behind this episode! MIT is training AI models to evaluate and admit their level of sureness and Jacqueline Gottlieb is considering the relationship between uncertainty and curiosity.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Jog to the Water” by Duck Lake, via Blue Dot Sessions. (This music and the featured image are admiring nods to Maggie’s open sea swimming – an uncertainty practice if ever there were one!)

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