Wonder, boredom, and technological forgetting

The rapid rise of AI demands that public servants hold on to curiosity and meaning to navigate a changing government landscape.

First published in the Mandarin

I recently flew from Sydney to London on an Airbus A380. It was a long trip, but nothing out of the ordinary. I settled into my seat, browsed the entertainment system, and endured the usual mix of mild discomfort and distraction that characterises modern air travel. While I was gliding through the stratosphere in a 560-tonne machine, 12 kilometres above the Earth, at nearly 1,000 kilometres per hour, I wondered why I wasn’t surprised by the whole situation.

And yet, a moment’s reflection ought to have given me pause. What my fellow travellers and I were doing was astonishing.

Air travel remains one of the most impressive technological achievements of the modern age. It’s a product of extraordinary engineering, cooperation, and creativity. But for most of us, it has become routine, almost dull. As I sat bored at 38,000 feet, I found myself thinking of a line by Terry Pratchett, spoken by his character Death: “In a universe full of wonder, they [human beings] have managed to invent boredom.”

Pratchett managed to be both funny and insightful. Human beings have an uncanny ability to take the miraculous for granted. We marvel briefly, adapt quickly, and then forget. The result is a peculiar paradox: the more advanced our technologies become, the less remarkable they seem. In a world saturated with marvels, we grow numb to wonder, yet, strangely, we are constantly worried about what will come next.

How quickly we assimilate transformative technologies into the background of daily life is something of a marvel. It suggests that our anxiety about AI may be less about what the technology is, and more about how rapidly we forget.

The speed of assimilation

Human history is marked by revolutionary inventions that once seemed like magic. The steam engine, electric light, telephone, aeroplane, computer, internet, and AI. In each case, we passed through a period of wonder mixed with anxiety, disruption, and then habituation. What was once unthinkable becomes commonplace.

This process of technological adaptation and assimilation is a defining characteristic of humans. Once woven into the rhythms of everyday life, a technology no longer seems like a mystery or a threat. It becomes an indispensable part of our daily infrastructure.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this. It’s how societies operate. If we marvelled at every electric light or every Google search, we’d never accomplish anything. But there is a cost to this forgetfulness. The faster we normalise new technologies, the less time we spend questioning what is changing and how it affects us.

Air travel is a prime example. Just over a century ago, the Wright brothers took their first flight. Now we barely look up when a jet flies overhead. The miracle of flight has become a familiar sound in city life. Similarly, smartphones have computing power surpassing that of the machines that once guided astronauts to the moon. We use them to doomscroll. The internet, the most transformative communication network in history, has become for many as essential, invisible, and unnoticed (except when disrupted) as the water supply (which is also a marvel).

In each case, marvel gives way to commonplace. And from commonplace, boredom is born.

Boredom in the age of miracles

Boredom might seem like a minor mental state, but it reveals deeper ideas. In a world full of new things and inventions, boredom isn’t just about personal boredom; it’s a reflection of the culture.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger regarded boredom as a gateway to deeper awareness. In moments of profound boredom, he argued, we confront the emptiness beneath everyday routines. We are thrown back on ourselves, forced to reckon with the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our habits. But modern boredom is of a different kind. It is not existential, but overstimulated. It’s the boredom of excess: too many options, too many distractions, not enough time to be astonished.

In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), Heidegger warned that modern technology does more than extend human capabilities; it changes how we perceive the world. It “enframes” reality, turning everything, including ourselves, into resources to be optimised. Under this logic, we come to see the world not as a place of wonder, but as a system of functions and outputs.

Adam Smith on wonder

In 1795, Adam Smith, best known for the concept of the invisible hand of the market and the division of labour, wrote Essays on Philosophical Subjects, in which he explored the topics of wonder, surprise, and admiration.  

Wonder is sparked by novelty and uniqueness, while surprise comes from unexpectedly seeing something familiar in an unfamiliar setting. Admiration, on the other hand, is inspired by greatness or beauty, even in familiar objects. However, for Smith, wonder—created when the normal flow of imagination is disrupted by something unusual, prompting a search for explanation and understanding—serves as a key motivation for learning.

Heidegger’s warning that in a technologically enframed world we lose our sense of wonder neatly complements Smith’s idea that wonder is the source of human learning and imagination. Our boredom isn't a failure to be entertained; it's a failure to keep our sense of wonder alive.

The unease around AI

Which brings us to artificial intelligence. Despite the rapid adoption of chatbots, language models, image generators, and decision engines, many people remain uneasy. AI evokes both fascination and concern.

One reason is that AI, unlike a plane or a smartphone, challenges our sense of uniqueness. It not only expands our capabilities but also mimics our cognition. It creates poems, diagnoses health issues, composes music, and passes law exams. And AI is often associated with distinctly human-like traits, such as ‘hallucinating’. It infiltrates our thinking processes and questions our worth. It blurs the line between human and machine more profoundly than previous technologies.

Few of us truly understand how a large language model generates convincing responses or how a neural network detects fraud. The inner mechanisms are hidden behind layers of abstraction, and there’s a suspicion that, as it becomes more complex, nobody knows how it functions.

Here, there is a contrast with older technologies. We may not fully understand jet propulsion or semiconductor physics, but we have developed social systems around those technologies—regulations, standards, and roles—that make them seem manageable.

AI, on the other hand, remains socially and ethically unanchored. It feels out of place with our moral frameworks and out of sync with our human practices. As a result, it sparks both our imagination and our anxiety.

A crisis of meaning

Much of the public discussion about AI focuses on practical issues: job losses, misinformation, and autonomy. The technology owners and futurists benefit from the anxiety that comes with this discussion. But beneath the surface, there is a deeper unease: a feeling that we may change in ways we do not yet fully grasp.

This isn’t new. Every major technological shift has altered human identity in some way. But because we adapt so quickly, we often don't notice the change until much later. As Winston Churchill said, “We shape the house and thereafter it shapes us.” The same goes for the tools we use. The technology we create eventually shapes us physically, socially, and psychologically.

The real reason to pause is not to indulge in fear or nostalgia, but to protect a capability we risk losing: the ability to stand in wonder, rather than mindlessly consuming content.

As we adopt AI, we might unintentionally become more compliant, less questioning, and less accountable.

Recovering wonder

What would it look like to recover a posture of wonder in the age of AI?

It doesn’t mean rejecting technology or glorifying ignorance. Wonder is not naïveté. It is a kind of attention, a way of seeing that resists narrowing the world and our experience to only the most immediately useful parts.

Wonder invites us to look again, to accept mystery, to welcome surprise, to admire the beautiful in the everyday, and to hold open the space between astonishment and understanding.

This rubs hard against the grain of our technology-filled daily lives. Technology is designed to lessen the burden and friction of our lives. Our challenge is to keep our sense of wonder and resist a world confined to what can be measured, controlled, and exploited. This may be essential if we wish to preserve our sense of agency amid accelerating change. 

Without wonder, we risk becoming bored custodians of systems we no longer comprehend. Without attention, we risk becoming alienated from ourselves and others.

The challenge of AI is not just technical or economic. It is philosophical. It forces us to confront questions of value, meaning, identity, and imagination. It asks whether we are still open to being surprised, to being overwhelmed by beauty, and to trusting our unaided imagination.

Looking again

Under the influence of technology, we begin to see everything, including nature and human beings, as resources to be optimised and controlled. This reduces the richness of the world to utility, productivity, and efficiency.

In a universe filled with wonder, boredom is not inevitable. It is a decision. Heidegger and Smith, faced with AI, would urge us to choose carefully how we want to be. 

Wonder may be our oldest form of intelligence. When technology mimics the mind, perhaps it is also our most essential human capability.