“The most valuable skill in history just changed forever,” began a post from X.
Is this clickbait? I wondered. Is this person whom I don’t know using extreme hype just to get my attention? Seriously, how can anything be more clickbait than “The most valuable skill in history just changed forever”?
I reserved judgement and kept reading.
“Elon Musk just handed you the only survival framework that matters,” the post continued.
Then it quoted Musk:
“The biggest thing is, what questions do we not know to ask?”
Post: “For centuries, the smartest person in the room held the most answers. AI didn’t level the playing field. It burned it down. Superintelligence in your pocket answers anything. Instantly. Perfectly. For free.”
Musk: “Once you know the question, the answer is usually the easy part.”
Post: “Let that land. The next generation of winners won’t be defined by what they know. They’ll be defined by what they think to ask. AI commoditized execution. Script, plan, code, strategy. Models handle all of it. The bottleneck was never intelligence. It was never labor. It’s curiosity.”
That last word got my attention.
You see, I’ve had a lifelong love affair with curiosity.
A few months ago, I did a Ted-X talk in San Diego on the “Superpower of Curiosity.”
I consider it the most underrated of human traits.
It doesn’t have the well-earned status of the great virtues like honesty, generosity, compassion, kindness and integrity.
But in its quiet, humble way, curiosity can lead to the most wonderful human relationships.
By making us ask questions, curiosity makes us better listeners.
By being better listeners, we learn to receive.
By receiving, we make others feel needed and valued, one of the deepest expressions of love.
Curiosity helps us uncover stories we didn’t know existed. Be curious with grandparents, ask them stories of their past, and you’ll see what I mean.
Curiosity also helps us connect with those who don’t share our opinions or world views. We find things in common. We grow and learn. Instant judgment makes for short conversations; curiosity makes life more interesting.
So much for the human angle.
But what about curiosity for our new world?
Let’s go back to the X post:
“It’s always been curiosity. Traditional education spent decades training you to memorize answers. AI made that obsolete overnight. Human value is no longer tied to knowledge. It’s tied to the judgment of which problems are even worth solving. That’s the gap machines can’t close. Because asking the right question isn’t a skill. It’s a worldview. It requires taste. Intuition. The ability to look at a landscape everyone else is staring at and see the one thing nobody thought to interrogate.”
As great as curiosity and asking questions sound for our new AI age, we live in a world that encourages the very opposite.
We are inundated with answers.
Wherever we look, whether on social media or in manifestos or fundraising pitches or passionate op-eds, the world throws answers at us.
Human nature makes us love answers. Answers mean solutions. Answers give us closure. Questions leave us hanging.
If you’re pitching an idea, the money is in answers, not questions.
The AI future may indeed belong to curiosity and the art of asking questions, but human nature will put up a fight.
So will curiosity, if only by necessity.
“Master the art of asking the exact right question to a machine that knows everything and you can build anything,” the post continues.
“The skill isn’t knowing. It’s knowing what to ask. That judgment, that taste for what’s worth pursuing, that’s the last truly human edge. The only one markets will keep paying for. Answers are infinite now. Free, instant, and available to everyone on earth equally. The only thing separating you from the person who builds the next great company is the quality of your questions. Answers are free. Questions are everything.”
If this new AI world encourages us to ask questions, who knows, we may all become better listeners.
Our Jewish tradition has always elevated the asking of questions. As the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “Judaism is the rarest of phenomena: a faith based on asking questions, sometimes deep and difficult ones that seem to shake the very foundations of faith itself.”
Judaism also encourages us to transcend human nature and aim higher; sometimes, even as high as the most valuable skill in history.
