I Love Top Gun Maverick. It's Formula to the Point of Absurdity

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"There is great storytelling still going on that is about the kind of things we're talking about to be what it is to be human," he says. "But if that's all you get, I think that leads to a kind of narrowing and thinning of the texture of your life and our lives." He adds: "I'm not into censorship or I don't think we ought to be subsidizing artistic movies ... but there are great opportunities out there"

When OpenAI launched its conversational chatbot this past November, author Ian Leslie was struck by the humanness of the computer's dialogue. Then he realized that he had it exactly backward: In an age that favors the formulaic and generic to the ambiguous, complex, and unexpected, it's no wonder that computers can sound eerily lifelike. Leslie tells EconTalk host Russ Roberts that we should worry less about the lifelike nature of AI and worry more that human beings are being more robotic and predictable. Leslie bolsters his argument with evidence from music and movies. The conversation includes a discussion of the role of education in wearing down the mind's rougher, but more interesting and more authentic, edges as well as how we might strive to be more human in the age of AI.