The True Scarcity: Why Questioning, Not Intelligence, Defines Our Age

By Stanley Ngugi, May 7th, 2025

In an era of unprecedented information abundance and rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, we often find ourselves wrestling with new definitions of intelligence, consciousness, and the future of human endeavor. LLMs can now generate vast swathes of content, from complex code to exhaustive research summaries, in mere seconds. This technological leap has led to a fascinating, yet unsettling, realization: the true scarcity in our hyper-connected world may not be intelligence itself, but the profound human capacity for questioning.

My recent observations of public discourse have crystallized this insight. Intelligence, in its myriad forms – analytical prowess, creative ingenuity, practical problem-solving, emotional intelligence – seems widely distributed. But the inclination, courage, and cultivated habit of deep, fundamental questioning? That, I believe, is the differentiating factor, the truly scarce commodity that separates superficial understanding from profound insight.

A Tale of Two Platforms: How We React to the Unforeseen

Consider the public reaction to a recent, significant piece of news: reports from May 2025 indicated that former President Joe Biden had been diagnosed with an aggressive, metastasized form of prostate cancer. His office confirmed the diagnosis was made after he experienced increasing urinary symptoms, noting his last known PSA test was in 2014. The news prompted widespread discussion.

On platform X (formerly Twitter), particularly among accounts populated by researchers, journalists, and politically engaged individuals, the dominant reaction centered on inquiry into the process. Questions abounded: "How did this aggressive cancer go undetected for so long?" "Is it possible there was a cover-up, or that the administration knew for a long time?" "Given his prior doctor's pronouncement of fitness for office, what does this imply about the vetting process or medical transparency?" These were questions aimed at systemic failures, accountability, and the integrity of information.

Contrast this with observations from a Kenyan Instagram news page. Here, the comments section offered a strikingly different picture. Reactions ranged from overt political animosity ("It should be the Kenyan president that got that, since they hate him so much") to general conspiracy theories about cancer itself, and some expressions of sympathy for Biden. What was notably absent, however, was any questioning of the cancer diagnosis itself. The fact of the cancer was accepted as a given, and reactions stemmed from that unexamined premise.

This divergence reveals a profound truth: the difference between people is not necessarily raw intelligence. Even if one platform attracts "highly talented researchers," intelligence, in its many forms, is abundant. What is scarce, however, is the very act of questioning. Questioning the premise, questioning our existence, consciousness, intelligence, and everything that we often take for granted.

The Scarcity of Inquiry: Beyond Information Retrieval

Questioning is more than asking "what?" or "how much?". It transcends simple information retrieval. True questioning involves:

• Probing the Premise: It's the audacity to ask, "Is this even true? What assumptions are embedded in this statement?" rather than merely reacting to the presented "fact."
• Seeking Underlying Mechanisms: It delves into "Why did this happen this way? What are the causal factors, the hidden variables, the systemic influences?"
• Challenging Certainty: It requires the uncomfortable embrace of doubt. Humans, by nature, often seek certainty, even if it's false or incomplete. Deep questioning shatters comforting illusions, demanding a continuous re-evaluation of our mental models.
• The Drive to Reduce Ignorance: It's an active, relentless curiosity, an intellectual hunger that compels us to look beyond surface-level explanations and push towards foundational truths.
• Resisting Conditioning: Societies, cultures, and even educational systems often inadvertently train us to accept, rather than to rigorously inquire. We learn to solve problems within defined frameworks, but less often to question the frameworks themselves.

The sheer volume of information in the digital age further exacerbates this scarcity. We are bombarded with data, news, and opinions. It becomes easier to passively consume and react than to pause, filter, critically engage, and deeply question every piece of information. The cognitive load required for continuous, deep inquiry is immense.

The "Something More" in Intelligence: AI and the Spirit of Inquiry

This realization has significant implications for how we perceive intelligence, both human and artificial. My own work in AI, particularly concerning concepts like "Intrinsic Uncertainty-Driven Exploration for Autonomous Data Generation," directly ties into this. When an AI system can identify and actively explore areas where its own knowledge is weak or uncertain, it is performing a functional act of questioning. It is implicitly "asking": "What don't I know well enough? How can I resolve this ambiguity?"

Crucially, as I've argued, machines do not need to be conscious to question. We can design AI with mechanisms for functional questioning:

• Epistemic Self-Awareness: An AI that has a computational representation of its own knowledge boundaries and uncertainties.
• Intrinsic Drive for Information Gain: An objective function that motivates it to seek data or generate hypotheses that reduce its internal doubt.
• Iterative Refinement: The ability to learn from the "answers" (new data or observations) and update its internal model, thereby reducing the uncertainty that prompted the query.

This "something more" is not consciousness in the human sense, but a powerful form of active inquiry that allows AI to transcend mere pattern recognition and become truly proactive, robust, and potentially creative. It's the difference between an LLM that can answer a query and one that can formulate its own query to advance its understanding or capability.

Questioning as the Compass for a Complex World

The scarcity of questioning has profound implications for our global society:

• Navigating Disinformation: In an age of deepfakes, AI-generated narratives, and echo chambers, the ability to question sources, motives, and underlying data becomes a fundamental survival skill.
• Fueling Innovation: True breakthroughs rarely come from optimizing within existing paradigms. They emerge from the courage to question long-held assumptions and explore radically different approaches.
• Fostering Societal Progress: Addressing grand challenges like climate change, poverty, or global health requires questioning the efficacy of current solutions, exploring unconventional collaborations, and challenging established power structures.
• Personal Growth and Wisdom: On an individual level, the capacity for self-questioning – challenging our own biases, beliefs, and narratives – is essential for genuine self-awareness, continuous learning, and emotional intelligence.

The ease with which information can now be generated only amplifies the critical importance of the human capacity to deeply question it. We are not just processors of data; we are meaning-makers, sense-givers, and architects of our understanding. The future belongs not to those who can merely consume or generate information, but to those who possess the insatiable curiosity and intellectual rigor to continually question everything, pushing the boundaries of what is known and what is possible. It is in this profound, yet increasingly scarce, act of inquiry that the true differentiator of intelligence will reside.