Curiosity and Grit Are All You Need

by Cam Marsollier

Cam Marsollier is a writer and techno-optimist who is making his Analog debut in our [July/August issue, on sale now!] with the story “As Time Goes By.” In this blog post, Marsollier discusses his vision for the future, and why he believes there is hope for humanity in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence

Humanity is racing toward change more profound than we’ve ever experienced: artificial general intelligence (AGI). Through the same technology we also get Asimov’s long-promised general purpose humanoid robots, with researchers’ advanced chassis—so far used for fun YouTube videos—turned into promisingly capable androids with a whiff of sentience.

Ray Kurzweil has long studied this accelerating rate of advancement and identified a point he calls The Singularity, where the future becomes impossible to predict because the compounding change is far too, well . . . sci-fi for us to ponder.

But what are we doing here if not striving to imagine the future? I believe The Singularity can be breached one bite at a time by focusing on aspects of human nature itself, a much more stable target than technology. We’re highly adaptable animals, and I believe the brightest path we can blaze is one where we fundamentally refocus our educational system around the concepts of curiosity and grit.

As a techno-optimist I see this future unfolding in stages:

1-5 years: Large Language Models (or LLMs, such as ChatGPT) get more and more capable, gaining the ability to learn and remember new skills as well as our preferences, accomplishing long-running tasks on our behalf. They continue to automate jobs and generate increasingly sophisticated artistic works. LLM-powered androids begin basic factory labor. Self-driving cars become capable and regulations to allow their widespread public use are forged. People wring hands and begin talking about universal basic income (UBI) for the increasingly unemployable.

6-10 years: Automation dominates driving, factory work, and white-collar jobs. Billion dollar companies exist with only a handful of employees coordinating a cloud of collaborative AI agents. The cost of creating most goods and services drops to near zero, as does the cost of the AI that powers them and therefore the cost of entry. A renaissance in creative goods and services explodes upon the world. Politicians tax the increasingly wealthy companies to fund UBI.

10+ years: No one works unless they want to. Goods and services are mostly “too cheap to meter,” with land, education, and experiences becoming the highest value commodities. Everyone has a personal android, which effectively is basic income: if money is distilled labor then free labor is unlimited money. Even moving completely off-grid becomes trivial, as a person’s android can dig a well, construct a home, grow food, and sell its labor to generate income.

Welcome to the future, where our heaviest burden is freedom.

It will be a massive change, but humans are notorious for settling in to a new normal in record time, so it will feel similar to present-day retirement: you were born, you were educated, you worked, but you were also lucky enough to witness the AGI singularity and no longer need a job.

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We’re highly adaptable animals, and I believe the brightest path we can blaze is one where we fundamentally refocus our educational system around the concepts of curiosity and grit.

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For the next generation born into this future, this will be their new normal and they’ll never have to work in the traditional sense, instead whiling away their days pursuing their interests: reading, playing video games, traveling, cooking, etc. But how should parents prepare their children for this era of leisure? Currently, we teach them self-sufficiency and ensure their education leads to gainful employment, but in a post-scarcity world they will never need to be employed. How do you prepare them for a life where they’re never required to do . . . anything?

A life free from work comes with pitfalls like frivolity, hedonism, sloth, and the purgatory of the idle: a lack of meaning.

I believe this future will call for a reimagining of our education system, centered around curiosity and grit. An incurious soul wastes their life on trivialities and mindless consumption, but even the most curious of cats will achieve nothing if they buckle at the first setback, especially without the real dangers of starvation and homelessness flogging them onward. But a curious person with firm resolve can achieve their maximum potential, which is the best any parent can hope for. Remember, Batman’s only superpower is grit (and unlimited resources, which we’ll all effectively have in this new age).

Our future children should be taught how to think, not what to think. All good schools already do this, of course, but the core value is curiosity. A curious mind tends not to accept something on faith and seeks the why of it, and an enlightened school will feed them with an excellent cross-section of knowledge, disciplines, and viewpoints spanning all of human wisdom. Standing on the shoulders of giants will be encouraged through study of the same, inspiring awe by realizing a lifetime of another’s experience can be yours from a few short days spent reading their works. Essential, too, is an understanding of human capabilities and weaknesses, including logical fallacies, cognitive biases, status-driven behavior, etc. We are amazing hardware running outdated, tribalistic, and deeply flawed software, and we will fall prey to its pitfalls without a cautionary map.

Instilling a deep curiosity will keep them engaged for life, fueled by the accelerating pace of change and eagerly embracing each new development arising from our collective creative accelerationism.

Of course, deep curiosity in a world where no one needs to work can still leave one a well-educated but unfulfilled learner, with a surface-level understanding of a million things but an empty soul. Identity and fulfillment require grit, which is obvious when realizing your life’s most meaningful accomplishments are usually the ones that were hard.

Before the Singularity, hardships demanded grit, lest you end up starving, homeless, or dead. In an age of abundance, it must be explicitly taught. Grit may feel difficult to teach, easily dismissed as something you have or you don’t, but everyone is capable of great acts of perseverance given the right incentives.

Begin by guiding a student to select a project they find interesting but slightly beyond their skillset. Help them develop those skills, learning resilience through failure, and perseverance through struggle until they finally succeed, their hearts swelling with pride from a hard thing accomplished by sweat and victory over adversity. If done well, they’ll reach for something else equally difficult and as yet out of reach. Continue to mentor, teaching them how to learn the skills on their own without guidance.

With time they’ll create their list of endless but meaningful projects they desperately want to tackle and lament only the lack of more hours in a day.

This is happening soon, and sooner still if you remember the rate of change is accelerating. As sci-fi soothsayers and cartographers, it’s our responsibility to speculate and anticipate, charting the internal perils and glowing paths for humanity beyond the Singularity and into our brightest future. Our best path forward is always through education, through knowing our weaknesses and and through encouraging our species’ greatest traits: curiosity and grit. By doing so, we can ensure a future where humanity thrives amidst unprecedented freedom and technological advancement.

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Cam Marsollier grew up on Isaac Asimov, Gashlycrumb Tinies, Sandman, Dungeons and Dragons, and H. P. Lovecraft. He loves digging into the how and why of the world and believes in utopia via technological accelerationism. He’s currently attempting to write a young adult adventure novel tackling tricky, modern-day themes of human biases and creating an app to archive a person’s life stories. He remains overshadowed by his delightful wife and daughter.