Good question right? But be careful, reinforcement learning isn’t necessarily the same thing as curiousity to my mind. Also, I think curiousity is on a spectrum. Sure you can build carrot/stick and right/wrong motivations into a machine, but can you build a real passion for serendipitous and perhaps illogical and inconvenient encounters? Is curiousity just an alertness to pattern breaking or is it a fundamental desire to know that cannot be taught to people let alone machines?
I guess we’ll find out sooner or later.
Three good articles on the subject.