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"In the Age of A.I., what makes people unique?" 

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

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In today’s newsletter, defining humanity, and then: • Skin-care TikTok for tweens • Trump woos the crypto bros • The post-food era

In the Age of A.I., What Makes People Unique?

We’re being challenged to define what’s valuable about being human. By Joshua Rothman Illustration by Josie Norton Recently, I got a haircut, and my barber and I started talking about A.I. “It’s incredible,” he told me. “I just used it to write a poem for my girl’s birthday. I told it what to say, but I can’t rhyme that well, so it did all the writing. When she read the poem, she actually cried! Then she showed it to her friend, who’s really smart, and I thought, Uh-oh, she’ll figure it out for sure.” Snip, snip, snip, snip. “She didn’t.” Everyone in the barbershop laughed, a little darkly. Writing poems that make your girl cry—add that to the list of abilities that used to make (some) humans unique but no longer do. Today’s A.I. systems can generate acceptable poetry, code, essays, and jokes; carry on useful conversations about economics, existentialism, and the Middle East; and even perform some aspects of scientific work, such as planning experiments, predicting outcomes, and interpreting results. They can make judgments about complex situations—traffic patterns, investments—at superhuman speed. In truth, we don’t yet know all they can do. The biggest tech companies are racing to deploy the technology partly so that we can find out. Keep reading

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P.S. For kids with the “rage to learn,” summer means nerd camp. Twenty years ago, Burkhard Bilger visited the Center for Talented Youth, meeting some of the most precocious young minds in America. As in many camps, there are dances and sack races and high jinks—but there’s also a ton of math. “These students spent six hours in class and never seemed to glance at their watches,” Bilger writes. “Beneath the blazing concentration in their faces lay a kind of serenity.” 🤓

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