The Curiosity Loop: Turning Defensiveness into Discovery
The first time AI disrupts something you thought was yours — your expertise, your creative voice, your professional edge — there’s a predictable response. You brace. You explain why it’s not really the same. You defend the territory.
I’ve watched this play out at every level. In the book, we tell the story of Samir, a Dubai venture capitalist whose entire investment thesis collapsed overnight when a twenty-two-year-old’s open-source project outperformed his $2.8 million bet. And Lia, a Singapore art teacher, who watched her student Wei Lin’s AI-enhanced self-portrait become technically superior to the original — and had to figure out what to say to a classroom of teenagers asking whether their art still counted.
Samir’s instinct was to defend. Lia’s was to freeze. Both are natural. Neither is useful.
The Curiosity Loop is what comes after those first instincts. It’s a repeatable practice — not a one-time exercise — for catching that defensive reflex and redirecting it toward something generative. The name borrows from the Zen concept of beginner’s mind: the capacity to see what’s actually there rather than what you expect to see.
What I find most interesting about this tool is how it compounds. The first time you use it, you’re fighting instinct. By the tenth time, you’ve started to notice things about AI — and about yourself — that defensiveness would have hidden. Samir flew to Bangalore to learn from the person who disrupted him. Lia admitted to her class, “I’m scared too” — and in doing so, transformed the conversation from one about technology into one about what it means to be uncertain and human.
Curiosity, in the context of AI, isn’t a personality trait. It’s a discipline. And like most disciplines, it gets easier with practice.
Download the Curiosity Loop from the book’s website, or explore it in full in AI and the Art of Being Human.
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The Curiosity Loop is one of 21 practical tools from AI and the Art of Being Human by Jeffrey Abbott and Andrew Maynard. The characters and narratives in the book are fictional — designed to reveal truths about AI and being human that only stories can capture.