Note: This is an AI-generated translation from my original Italian article: Crescere con un oracolo in tasca

What do we lose when the effort of understanding becomes optional?

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The Feltrinelli on Corso Umberto

As a child, I was extremely curious. That annoying kind of curiosity — the kind that asks a thousand questions, takes everything apart, is never satisfied with the first answer. I often went with my mother to central Pescara. In the early years we took the bus from Spoltore, on the ARPA line. Even today, when I can, I like to take a bus — especially in the evening. The noises, the sounds, the smells take me back to those years. The vibrations under my feet, the doors opening with that pneumatic hiss, the yellowish light cutting through the darkness outside the window. Maybe I'm a bit too nostalgic.

When we were in Pescara, I hated wandering past shop windows. Fashion, shoes, homeware shops: for a child like me, it was torture. So I'd get my mother to leave me at the Feltrinelli, a very well-stocked bookshop on Corso Umberto. And there, in the science books section, I'd sit on the floor and browse. I read voraciously, with no plan, no goal. I'd pick up an astronomy book and start reading, mesmerized by a photo of Jupiter. Then I'd put it down and grab one on electronics. Then one on biology. Every book opened a door that contained ten more. I didn't understand everything — in fact, I understood very little. But that little was enough to make me want more.

And among the most beautiful gifts I could receive, there were books. I didn't love fiction, but I adored any book that talked about science in general — chemistry, astronomy, you name it. I still keep those books jealously guarded.

Other times I'd get dropped off at Costantini. That's where I bought my first copy of "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie. It was love at first sight: thirty-two keywords, done. Nothing more. A language that fit in your pocket, very close to the low-level languages I'd already learned to master. But what I remember most isn't the book itself. It's the bus ride home, with that volume on my knees, leafing through it under the flickering light, trying to figure out what a function pointer was. I didn't get it that day. Or the day after. I got it weeks later, at home, in front of the screen, trying and failing and trying again. And when I finally understood, that understanding was mine. I had earned it.

Here's the thing: curiosity, for me, has always had a geography and a timeline. It had the seat of a bus, the floor of the Feltrinelli, weeks of failed attempts. It had patience.

The oracle that won't make you wait

A ten-year-old child today doesn't need to take any bus. Doesn't need to sit on any bookshop floor. Doesn't need to wait weeks to understand what a function pointer is. They open an app, type the question, and in two seconds they have an answer. Not just any answer: an articulate, clear, personalized answer that adapts to their level, gives examples, anticipates the next question.

The oracle is in their pocket. Always available, always patient, always ready. It has no opening hours, no closing days, it never gets tired. It doesn't give you a dirty look if you ask a stupid question. It doesn't tell you "figure it out yourself." It answers, immediately, and if you don't understand, it rephrases, simplifies, tries again.

From the standpoint of access to information, it's a miracle. A child in a mountain village has the same access to knowledge as one living next to the Library of Congress. Economic, geographic, linguistic barriers are thinning like never before. All of this is real, and it would be dishonest not to acknowledge it.

But that child will never need to take a bus to find an answer. They won't have the frustration of not understanding, the empty time in which an idea matures, the accidental discovery of the book next to the one you were looking for. They won't know what it means to want an answer and have to wait.

And the question I keep asking myself, more and more often, is: does it matter?

The space between the question and the answer

Let me try to explain why I believe it does.

When I was sitting on the floor of the Feltrinelli browsing an astronomy book I half understood, I wasn't acquiring information. I was doing something far more important: I was learning to sit with things I didn't understand. I was developing a tolerance for confusion, for incompleteness, for that uncomfortable feeling of having pieces in your head that don't fit together yet.

John Keats, in a letter to his brothers in 1817, gave this capacity a name: he called it negative capability — the condition in which a person "is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." He was talking about Shakespeare, about what made his genius different from a philosopher's. But he was describing something universal: deep understanding requires first accepting that you don't understand. You can't get anywhere if you can't linger at the starting point.

There is an enormous difference between having an answer and understanding something. The answer is a datum. Understanding is a process. The answer arrives in an instant. Understanding requires time, mistakes, attempts, dead ends, backtracks, and that magical moment when the pieces finally fit together and you think "ah, that's what it means." That moment cannot be accelerated. It cannot be delivered. It can only be lived.

The K&R I bought at Costantini contained all the answers about the C language. They were there, printed on paper, accessible. But the understanding wasn't in the book. It was in the journey between the book and me. It was in the weeks of trying. It was in the compiler errors I didn't understand, which forced me to reread, rethink, restructure my mental model. If someone had given me the right answer on the first try, I would have had the information. But I would have missed the understanding. And understanding, unlike information, becomes part of you.

Serendipity needs friction

There's another aspect at risk of being lost, one that's perhaps even more subtle: accidental discovery.

At the Feltrinelli, I went for the computer books. But the science section was one big area, and to reach the computers I had to walk past biology, physics, astronomy. And every time, something would catch me. A title. A cover. An illustration glimpsed while flipping through. That unplanned stroll through the shelves gave me more than I could have asked for, because it gave me things I didn't know I wanted.

Serendipity — the fortunate discovery of something you weren't looking for — is by definition impossible to program. You can't ask the oracle about something you don't know you want to know. You can't formulate a question about a subject whose existence you're unaware of. The oracle answers what you ask. But the most important discoveries of my intellectual life have been answers to questions I hadn't yet formulated.

A recommendation algorithm might object: "But that's exactly what we do! We suggest things you didn't know you wanted!" And that's partly true. But there's a fundamental difference. The algorithm suggests things that people similar to you have wanted. It keeps you inside a profile, a cluster, a bubble. The shelf of a bookshop doesn't know who you are. It has no profile on you. It simply puts everything in front of you, and chance does the rest.

Friction — the fact of having to physically walk, browse, search — is what creates the space for the unexpected. Remove the friction, and you remove the unexpected. Make everything frictionless, and you make everything predictable.

Patience as a skill

I realize all of this might sound like nostalgia. The old guy (editor's note: I'm not that old, mind you!) who pines for the old days, when you walked uphill to school and studied by candlelight. That's not what I mean.

I'm not saying the past was better. I'm saying the past contained, almost by accident, conditions that fostered the development of deep capabilities. And those conditions are disappearing without us noticing, and without us replacing them with something equivalent.

Patience is one of these capabilities. Not patience as some abstract moral virtue, but patience as a concrete cognitive skill: the ability to stay with a problem long enough to truly understand it. To not jump to the first solution. To tolerate ambiguity. To let ideas ripen.

Every innovation of the last thirty years has worked to reduce waiting time. Faster connections. Quicker searches. More immediate answers. And every reduction has been presented as progress, and in many ways it was. But patience develops only in waiting. If you eliminate the wait, you eliminate the ground in which patience grows.

You often hear that children's attention spans have shortened. I'm not convinced: some research contradicts this, and the most cited figure — "eight seconds, less than a goldfish" — is an urban legend with nonexistent sources. But even if it were true, it wouldn't be a criticism of the kids. It would be an observation about the conditions in which they're growing up. If you've never had to wait for an answer, why should you be good at waiting?

Hidden complexity, shallow understanding

Here's where a thread comes together that I care about deeply: the relationship between complexity and understanding.

The world is complex. Every time science looks deeper, it finds more complexity, not less. A cell that under an optical microscope looks like a transparent sack with a nucleus is actually a megalopolis of nanomachines, with logistics systems, quality checkpoints, communication networks. A program that "works" hides beneath its surface architectural decisions, security trade-offs, edge cases, structural fragilities. A geopolitical conflict that in headlines seems simple ("the good guys versus the bad guys") is in reality a tangle of history, economics, culture, collective psychology.

The oracle in your pocket gives answers. Fluid, articulate, convincing answers. But answers, by their nature, simplify. They have to: an answer that contained all the complexity of a subject wouldn't be an answer — it would be a library. And a good simplification is an act of intelligence: distilling the essential without betraying the substance.

The problem is that the person receiving the simplified answer doesn't know what was removed. Doesn't know what's missing. Doesn't have the tools to assess whether the simplification is honest or whether it's a mutilation. And above all, doesn't feel the need to ask, because the answer seems complete. AI generates text with a confidence that leaves no room for doubt. It doesn't say "maybe," it doesn't say "it's complicated," it doesn't say "it depends." It just says. With a fluency we mistake for competence.

Simple and simplistic are not the same thing. Making something accessible is an act of intellectual generosity. Making something simplistic is a form of deception — sometimes unintentional, but always dangerous. And the difference between the two is visible only to those who have the depth to grasp it.

That depth is built the way you build a muscle: with exercise, effort, time. It's built by reading books you don't understand on the first reading. It's built by trying things that don't work. It's built by waiting, failing, starting over. It's built in the space between the question and the answer — that space the oracle has abolished.

The luxury of not knowing

There's a concept in the philosophical tradition called docta ignorantia — learned ignorance. Nicholas of Cusa formulated it in the fifteenth century: the highest form of knowledge is knowing that you don't know. It's not false modesty. It's the awareness that every answer opens deeper questions, that every understanding reveals new complexity, that knowledge is a horizon that recedes as we approach it.

Socrates put it more directly: "I know that I know nothing." And he made that not-knowing the engine of inquiry, the fuel of philosophy, the spark of the most fertile curiosity.

Now: what happens when you grow up in a world where not-knowing isn't a condition to explore but a problem to solve in two seconds? Where every gap has an instant remedy? Where "I don't know" doesn't have time to become "I want to know" because the answer arrives before the desire?

Not-knowing is a creative space. It's the place where real questions are born — the ones you won't find in any FAQ, the ones no algorithm anticipates because they're yours and yours alone. It's the space where the child at the Feltrinelli browses an astronomy book without knowing what he's looking for and finds something he didn't know he wanted.

That luxury — the luxury of not knowing and being able to remain in not-knowing long enough to transform it into genuine curiosity — is becoming rare. Not because anyone forbids it, but because the oracle makes it unnecessary. Because the instant answer fills the void before the void can do its work.

It's not about technology

I want to be clear on one point, because I don't want to be misunderstood. I'm not making an argument against technology. I'm not saying AI is evil, that we should take smartphones away from children, that things were better when they were worse. Those who know me know that I use artificial intelligence every day, that I consider it one of the most powerful tools I've ever had, that I see it as an extraordinary amplifier of capability.

The point is something else. The point is that powerful tools require trained users. And the formation of a human being — the building of the capacity to think — is not the same thing as access to information.

You can give a ten-year-old access to the entirety of human knowledge, and they remain a ten-year-old. It's not the quantity of information that will transform them into an adult capable of critical thinking. It's the process. The journey. The struggle. The getting lost and the finding your way back. The unanswered questions that keep them awake at night. The books they don't understand but keep browsing because something draws them in even though they can't name what.

The bus from Spoltore to Pescara took about half an hour. Half an hour in which nothing productive happened. No information consumed, no answers obtained, no content scrolled. Just a child looking out the window and thinking. Maybe about what he'd find at the Feltrinelli. Maybe about what he'd read the time before. Maybe about nothing in particular.

That "nothing in particular" was precious. It was the time when ideas settled, connections formed, curiosity accumulated like pressure in a container that would sooner or later find an outlet. It was non-productive time that produced something irreplaceable: the ability to think without external stimuli.

The question I can't answer

I don't have definitive answers. I don't have a ten-point program to save children's curiosity in the age of AI. I distrust anyone who does.

What I have is a question, and I believe it's the right question: what spaces of not-knowing are we preserving?

I don't mean physical spaces, though it wouldn't hurt if bookshops stopped closing. I mean cognitive spaces. Moments when it's allowed to not know, not understand, not have the answer. Moments when the question can remain suspended long enough to become something greater than itself.

Every generation has had its shortcuts and its timid voices proclaiming the end of civilization. Socrates feared that writing would destroy memory. Critics of the printing press feared books would destroy oral thought. Critics of television feared it would destroy reading. In every case, they were right about something and wrong about everything else: something was lost, much was gained, and civilization found new equilibria.

But new equilibria don't find themselves. They're built with intentionality. And intentionality requires that someone ask the uncomfortable questions.

Here's mine: a child who grows up with an oracle in their pocket, who has never had to search for an answer because the answer finds them first, who has never known the fertile void of not-knowing — will that child still have the desire to understand? Will they still have the patience? Will they still have the ability to look complexity in the face without immediately reaching for a simplification?

I don't know. But I know the question keeps me awake. And a question that keeps you awake is worth more than a hundred answers that make you scroll past.