I was recently driving with the family when the conversation turned to planking. We each shared our preference for hands or forearms (hands won) and compared how long we could hold a plank maintaining proper form (I lost). I found myself wondering out loud about how long a human being could actually do this. Within six seconds, the answer emerged from the backseat, “9 hours, 38 minutes and 47 seconds for a man and 4 hours, 30 minutes and 11 seconds for a woman.” End of discussion. Literally.

What, in the past, would have entertained us for quite a while — speculating which muscles might fail first or strategies for distracting oneself from the pain — didn’t happen because of one friction-free answer. And it got me wondering … about the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on wondering.

The Impact of AI

The simple act of wondering doesn’t just yield information. It sets off a journey of discovery that demands patience and focus. It builds the emotional regulation required to sit in the sometimes uncomfortable soup of confusion. It forges neural pathways because of the silent collaboration of the subconscious. And it produces those peak “aha” moments that are profoundly satisfying and build the confidence to wonder yet again.

That loop — struggle, breakthrough, grow — is one of the most distinctly human experiences available to us. By outsourcing (or at least short-circuiting) it, we’re losing two things, and they’re not equal.

The first is the skill. There’s considerable public debate about AI’s weakening of the cognitive muscle required for deep, sustained thinking. That needs to be taken seriously, but it’s recoverable. As learning and development (L&D) professionals know well, a skill can be rebuilt when the will exists.

The second loss is more dangerous. We’re losing the motivation to wonder — the appetite to volunteer our time, energy, attention and patience to a question that won’t answer itself. When instant answers become the norm, our tolerance for friction recalibrates. Extending the exercise metaphor, the weight gets lighter. The muscle atrophies. And eventually we stop even reaching for the heavy things — not because we’ve decided to, but because we’ve simply forgotten what it felt like to carry them.

Once that appetite is extinguished, the skill has nothing to stand on, which makes this more than a capability crisis. It may quickly become an intractable motivation crisis. And it deserves L&D’s most serious attention.

The Role of L&D

Who outside of the learning function is better suited to protect and provoke the fundamental human skill and will to wonder? The answer, I’d argue, is nobody. Here’s where we start:

• Push back against the efficiency mandate. Make the business case to leadership that productive struggle is where capability develops. A learning culture optimized entirely for frictionless answers is producing people who can retrieve but can’t create or innovate.

• Defend the time to wonder. Advocate systemically for unstructured thinking space. Position tolerance for unresolved questions not as inefficiency but as the organizational conditions that generate breakthrough thinking.
• Reposition not-knowing as a strategic asset. Work to shift the cultural narrative so that sitting with a hard question signals intellectual courage and leadership maturity rather than incompetence or indecision

• Curate generative collisions. Expose people to perspectives and problems from outside their immediate world. Disrupt existing thinking in productive ways. This goes beyond cross-functional learning; I’m talking about genuinely novel or unsettling intellectual encounters that leave people carrying questions they can’t immediately resolve.
• Design for intentional incompleteness. Build learning experiences that offer learners questions to carry rather than concepts to file away. Make the unresolved ending a feature, not a failure, of instructional design.

For a profession based on figuring out how to quickly and effectively help others know, it’s ironic that at this time we may be called upon to lean into the opposite: facilitating great comfort with the unknown (at least for a while). How will we handle it? I wonder.