Cats, small children, and most adults are curious. They ask questions about what they see, wonder about what they hear, and object to what they are told This curiosity is not so wondrous when we realize that once a system makes predictions, these predictions might fail, and the system should wonder why. The ability to wonder why, to generate a good question about what is going on, and the ability to invent an answer, to explain what has gone on to oneself, is at the heart of intelligence. We would accept no human who failed to wonder or explain as very intelligent. In the end, we will have to judge AI programs by the same criteria.

Animals desire food, ..., shelter, survival. We humans have such desires along with a much longer list including respect, honor, power, fame, wealth and so on. Frankfurt argues that while, like animals, we have desires, we have something the animals do not have. We can have desires about our desires. I might crave ice cream and I might decide to satisfy that craving. But I can also desire not to crave ice cream. I still might end up eating ice cream but I can have regret. I can decide to try to curb my desire the next time I face a dessert choice. An animal, claims Franfurt, cannot do that.

Three attributes characterize worker passion: Commitment to Domain and Questing and Connecting dispositions. Commitment to Domain can be understood as a desire to have a lasting and increasing impact on a particular industry or function. Workers with the Questing disposition actively seek out challenges to rapidly improve their performance. Workers with the Connecting disposition seek deep interactions with others and build strong, trust-based relationships to gain new insight. Together these attributes define the “passion of the Explorer”—the worker passion that leads to extreme sustained performance improvement.

In the second part of The Neo-Generalist, we explore some of the characteristics and behaviours that we associate with the concept. Among them are: An acceptance that we are always in beta, never the finished product. An understanding that we never truly know (recognising that the history of scientific discovery teaches us that what was correct yesterday is wrong tomorrow; that the bounds of the unknown grow exponentially). A passion for learning fuelled by never-sated curiosity. A tolerance of ambiguity. An ability to adapt to change. A willingness to test out the crazy hypothesis, as an opportunity to either create or educate. Plus a host of skills that we associate with leadership, sense-making and communication.