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May 28th, 2026
​A newsletter by Anne-Laure Le Cunff​

🪢 The Cost of Easy Answers

A colleague and I were recently comparing notes on how differently we work now versus a few years ago. He mentioned something that stuck with me: he remembers the content of papers he wrote before AI tools far better than recent ones.

I recognized the feeling immediately. There was a time when I knew I couldn’t read every study, so I had to be intentional about which threads to pull. I’d sit with a question for days between deep dives into the literature, turning it over, letting my curiosity grow before the next round of reading.

The journey was slow, sometimes frustrating, but it left a mark. I owned the answers I arrived at because I’d earned them through slow exploration.

Now I move faster and I cover more ground. But the path is harder to trace afterward, and the conclusions sometimes feel less like mine.

I think it’s easy to romanticize the older way of working and I don’t want to fall into that trap, but I do wonder what’s disappearing in the upgrade.

Yes, AI is exceptional at pattern recognition and synthesis. It can process vast amounts of information and surface connections that would take humans months to find. But AI exploration is computational and goal-directed. It works within known possibility spaces.

Human curiosity operates differently: it’s intuitive. For instance, Fleming wasn’t trying to invent antibiotics when he noticed mold killing bacteria in a contaminated dish. And Penzias and Wilson weren’t looking for evidence of the Big Bang when they discovered cosmic microwave background radiation. They were investigating unexplained noise in their radio telescope.

These breakthroughs came from noticing something unexpected and caring enough to follow it.

Human curiosity also carries something AI cannot replicate: context shaped by values and lived experience. We don’t just ask whether something works. We ask who it works for, at what cost, and whether it’s worth pursuing at all.

So the deeper risk isn’t that machines become more capable than us. It’s that when every gap in understanding gets filled instantly, we lose the conditions that make human curiosity possible: uncertainty, contradiction, and time to sit with what we don’t yet know.

So how do we stay curious when answers are available at our fingertips? Here are three practices I try to implement in my everyday work:

1. Delay the lookup. When you have a question, resist reaching for an AI answer straight away. Let yourself speculate, sit with the not-knowing. The idea isn’t to avoid AI entirely, but to give your own curiosity some space to unfold before AI fills in the blanks.

2. Use AI to expand your thinking, not replace it. Ask AI to challenge an assumption, surface angles you haven’t considered, or generate possibilities you can then evaluate yourself.

3. Protect unstructured curiosity time. If every idle moment gets filled with optimized content or instant answers, the slow, weird and wonderful questions never get a chance to emerge. Curiosity thrives in moments of boredom, on walks and in the shower, so make sure to not fill those spaces with podcasts and other content.

When answers are so abundant, the scarce resource is the quality of your questions – and the willingness to explore them for long enough.

So before you reach for the next answer, try staying with the question a little longer. This is how we’ll ensure curiosity doesn’t become a relic of a less efficient era.

🔬 Tiny Experiment of the Week

Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment:

This experiment will help you spend more time following a single thread of curiosity instead of quickly jumping between instant AI-generated answers. Want to dig deeper? ​​Get your copy of Tiny Experiments​.

👀 Into the Mind of...

NICHOLAS EPLEY

Each week I ask a curious mind about their habits, routines, and rituals. This week we learn from Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, whose latest book A Little More Social explores the psychology of human connection and social decisions.

1. One strategy to restart your creative engine? Asking a colleague or a friend out to lunch. Just like you restart a battery on a car by jumpstarting it with someone else’s charged battery, I get my creativity jumpstarted by connecting in conversation to someone else’s creativity.

2. One anchor ritual to reconnect with yourself? Dinner with my family. My job as a professor can be very stressful. Sitting down at the dinner table with people who love me for reasons far beyond the work I do reminds me every day of what’s most important for me to be paying attention to.

3. One habit you wish you had? Exercising daily. I’ve tried all of the tricks that psychologists know well, but have never made it stick. I’m now on the hunt for a magic wand to make it happen.

A Little More Social

🛠️ Brain Picks

• Not just summaries – understanding. Shortform goes beyond quick takeaways. Each guide includes deep insights, exercises, and connections across ideas so you don’t just read – you think better. If you care about learning that sticks, this is a different kind of reading experience. See how it works. Ness Labs readers get 20% off.

• Your daily brain boost. Portable, wearable, and designed for everyday use. The near infrared light used in the Neuronic helmet can increase ATP, improve circulation, elevate mood, and support neurodegeneration. Try Neuronic.

• You have 80,000 hours in your career. Most advice on how to spend those hours is based on no evidence – or worse, misleading platitudes like “follow your passion.” 80,000 Hours is a tried-and-tested career guide covering what actually makes a dream job, which skills matter in the age of AI, and how to find work that makes a difference. Order your copy now.

Many thanks to our sponsors and cross-promo partners for supporting the Ness Labs newsletter! Want to appear here? Please email support@nesslabs.com to learn more.

🗓️ Community Events

If you enjoy the newsletter, you’ll love our community of curious minds conducting tiny experiments within a safe space and learning together. Here is an overview of upcoming events (full calendar):

• Develop creative confidence. In this ​workshop​, Gosia Fricze will help you explore how constant comparison impacts your creative confidence, where self-doubt creeps in, and how to reconnect with your own voice and standards.​
• Remix your professional story. In this workshop, Rachel Ropeik will help you reimagine and reshape how you talk about your work based on what you want to amplify in the current moment, context, and next chapter of your adventure.
​• Write with accountability partners. Have you been procrastinating on your newsletter or book project? Join Ethan Miller for our next cowriting session today.​
• Design an AI-powered reflection practice. Join Zsombor Koman for this hands-on session to learn how to use AI not as a faster answer machine but as a thinking partner that slows you down in productive ways.
​• Make progress on your projects. Join Kathryn Ruge for our Monday ‘body doubling’ coworking session to work on personal or work-related projects that you want to make progress on, covering all timezones.
​• Improve your knowledge management system. Join our next PKM meeting where we learn from one another through sharing how our systems work in the real world and give new PKM users a leg up.
​• Host your own workshop. Do you have an idea for a short presentation and Q&A or a workshop you’d like to trial? Test your first iteration in the Ness Labs community and get feedback. We promote all sessions here in the newsletter.

All of these and future events are included in the price of the membership (only $49 for one year), as well as access to our courses, workshop library, and a dedicated space to track your tiny experiments.

Until next week, take care!
Anne-Laure.