Teaching Curiosity at the Edge of Change
Why I’m less interested in predicting the future and more interested in helping my daughters meet it.
When I read Matt Shumer’s Something Big Is Happening, what stayed with me wasn’t the scale of the claim. It was the audience he chose. He didn’t write it for the industry. He wrote it for the people in his life who kept asking what was going on with AI and getting the softened version instead of the real one. That choice tells you almost everything. Not about AI, but about the moment we’re in.
He uses the early‑COVID comparison to make the point. That strange stretch of time when life still looked normal, but things were changing around us. And reading it now, I found myself thinking less about the analogy and more about the quieter question underneath it. The one parents feel before anyone else says it out loud.
What do you tell your kids when the world starts changing faster than you can explain it?
Shumer later said he never meant the essay to scare anyone. The point, in his view, is to start engaging with the tools so you understand what’s coming. And that’s where the essay lands for me. Not in the alarm. In the posture.
When the world accelerates, the most honest thing we can give our kids isn’t certainty but curiosity.
I remember the beginning of COVID in a way that makes Shumer’s analogy feel less like a device and more like a memory I can still feel. My younger daughter was reading everything she could find about the virus, tracking every update long before most people around us were paying attention. My older daughter had just come back from Italy, and our house went into quarantine before the rest of the world understood why that might be necessary.
And even then, even with all of that, I still told myself it would be a couple of weeks. Maybe a month. Life would pause, then resume. I didn’t understand that the old normal wasn’t waiting for us on the other side. We were already stepping into a different world, and we didn’t know it yet.
I look at my girls now and see how much that period shaped them. The world changed. Not in a dramatic, cinematic way, but in the quiet way that settles into your routines and rewrites them. And that’s why Shumer’s framing makes sense to me. He chose an experience almost all of us lived through. Not identical, but shared enough that we recognize the shape of it. The moment when you realize the world you thought you were returning to isn’t the one you’re standing in anymore.
Technology shifts in the past have usually felt incremental. Even with AI, the progress didn’t arrive fully formed. It grew. It stumbled. It surprised us in small, manageable steps. But as Shumer argues, something changed around 2025. New techniques unlocked a faster pace of progress, and the jumps stopped spacing themselves out.
We’re now reading headlines that talk about changes arriving in months rather than years, a pace that feels out of sync with how humans usually process and adapt. Reporting around his essay echoes this, describing AI progress unfolding on compressed timelines that leave very little room for institutions or individuals to adjust.
You don’t have to agree with every part of Shumer’s framing to understand why he wanted the people he loves to hear this from him directly. When you’re close to a change, you want to translate it before it becomes unrecognizable. You want to give people a way in.
One thing I appreciate about his essay is that he later clarified he never meant it to scare people. He said the point wasn’t alarm. It was participation. He wanted people to start using the tools so they could understand what’s coming, not brace for impact.
That distinction matters. Panic shuts people down. Engagement opens them up. And if the pace of change really is compressing the way he and others describe, then the most grounded response isn’t to catastrophize. It’s to stay present. To stay curious. To stay willing to learn something new even when the ground feels unsteady.
This is the part that keeps circling back for me. You can’t give your kids a map of the future. You can’t promise them stability or predictability or a world that moves at a pace that feels safe or comfortable. But you can give them a way of meeting change without losing themselves.
And I think about this a lot because I’ve lived a version of it before. During COVID, I did everything I could to make my girls feel secure. I told them we would be okay. I tried to create steadiness in a moment when nothing felt steady. And the truth is, I didn’t know. None of us did. But panic and fear don’t help anyone, especially kids. What helps is presence. What helps is calm. What helps is giving them something solid to stand on, even if that “solid” thing is just the way you show up for them.
I feel the same way now when I think about AI and the pace of change. I want to tell them everything will be fine. I want to give them certainty. But I can’t. What I can give them is a way to meet the world as it shifts. Stay curious. Stay open. Be willing to learn, grow, and adapt. That’s the best any of us can do, and it’s so much better than panic.
Curiosity.
Adaptability.
A willingness to explore unfamiliar tools and ideas without assuming they’re either salvation or threat.
Shumer’s essay is written for the people he loves. Mine is, too. And if there’s anything worth passing down, it’s not a set of answers. It’s a posture. A way of staying open when the world accelerates.
When I think about my daughters and the world they’re stepping into, I don’t think about predictions. I think about posture. I think about how COVID shaped them, how they learned to navigate uncertainty before they had the language for it. And I think about how the next wave of change will ask something similar of all of us.
The world they inherit will be shaped by people who stay curious long after certainty stops being available. Curiosity isn’t a hedge against change. It’s a way of moving through it. And if there’s one thing I hope they carry with them, it’s that.
Bibliography
• Shumer, Matt. Something Big Is Happening. https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
• New York Magazine interview with Matt Shumer: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/viral-ai-post-anthropic-chatgpt.html
• CNBC coverage of Shumer’s clarification: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/investor-matt-shumer-says-viral-essay-wasnt-meant-to-scare-people.html
• MoneyControl analysis of AI progress timelines: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/something-big-is-happening-matt-shumer-clarifies-his-ai-warning-wasn-t-fear-mongering-13827457.html