What It Means to Be Human Being?

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I think it's worth thinking about the deeper question what it means to be human being. It starts to remind me of the nose experience machine where you know you hook yourself up to a machine and you experience what feels like reality. I see it as these brilliant machines kind of brilliant technology throwing the question back to us. So what have you got? You know, you do better. They're raising the bar for us and vice versa by being more human. We make it more difficult for them to imitate us. So we raise the bar for them. That's fascinating.

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.