The following was excerpted and adapted from a commencement speech given at Bard College on May 23.
Let me start by giving you a trigger warning. I’ve noticed in this commencement season, some graduation speeches have provoked a few boos from students. So, I should probably warn you that I am about to utter the two most provocative letters in the English language today: AI. Artificial intelligence.
But in fact, I don’t really want to talk to you about AI. I want to talk about HI: Human Intelligence.
Every generation has confronted transformative technologies that seemed destined to overwhelm humanity: the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the internet. Each inspired wonder and panic in equal measure. And now comes the mother of them all: AI — able to write essays, compose music, diagnose diseases, do high-level math, generate videos, pass professional exams and converse with alarming fluency.
People naturally ask: “What will be left for human beings to do?” But perhaps that is the wrong question.
The better question is: “What does AI tell us about all the things that we humans already do, and do distinctively and irreplaceably?” The answer, I think, is profoundly hopeful.
Consider first the sheer miracle of the human brain.
A human brain weighs about three pounds. It runs on roughly 20 watts of power — about the energy needed to dimly light a refrigerator bulb. Training some of the most advanced AI systems in the world requires data centers consuming hundreds of millions of watts of electricity — enough to power entire cities.
These facilities stretch across hundreds of acres, filled with giant servers, massive cooling systems and miles of cables. Meanwhile, your three-pound brain is sitting quietly inside your skull, using less energy than a laptop charger. And yet it can do things that still baffle machines.
A toddler can recognize a face instantly in poor lighting, understand tone and emotion, navigate a crowded room, learn language socially, infer intentions and grasp context — all effortlessly. Human beings can understand irony, ambiguity, affection, embarrassment, love, shame, humor and longing. We can read a room. We can sense tension in silence. We can detect insincerity in a smile.
Machines are astonishingly good at analysis. But humans do more. We live in a complex world inhabited by other humans.
The computer scientist Yann LeCun has pointed out that human intelligence is not merely computation. It is embodied experience, social understanding and emotional cognition layered over millions of years of evolution. And so perhaps we should stop imagining human beings as inferior computers.
We sometimes reduce intelligence to narrow forms of analytical reasoning — the kinds of things that machines can optimize. But as the author Michael Pollan reminds us, human consciousness is richer and more mysterious than that.
A machine can write a sad poem, but it cannot weep at a funeral. It can generate a love letter, but it cannot fall in love. It can describe fear, but it cannot lie awake at 3 a.m. worrying about whether it has wasted its life. And this matters because the most important dimensions of being human are the experiences that we live.
The more powerful AI becomes, the more we may rediscover how much we value the distinctly human.
Already, AI-generated novels, essays, paintings, songs and videos are proliferating online by the millions. Technically, some are impressive. But most people do not care very much about them. Why? Because art is just as much about the human being behind it — if not more — than about the final product. We relate to art because it comes from another human being.
When we read a novel by Charles Dickens or Toni Morrison or Gabriel García Márquez, we don’t just consume words arranged elegantly on a page. We enter their consciousness. We care that another human being struggled, suffered, imagined, doubted, hoped and somehow transformed all of that into language. These writings are moving because they are, in some sense, imperfect.
The greatest poet in the English language, John Keats, spoke of “negative capability,” meaning the ability to live with uncertainty, doubt and mystery — without the “irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
In Japan, the central concept of Wabi-Sabi celebrates imperfection, incompleteness, asymmetry, transience, roughness and irregularity. Handmade ceramics are treasured precisely because they bear the mark of the human being — with asymmetries, uneven glazes and distortions that reveal individuality and craftsmanship. Broken pottery is sometimes repaired with veins of gold, a practice called Kintsugi. The crack shines instead of being hidden. The resulting surface is rough, but what moves us is the visible evidence of frailty and repair.
For decades, society encouraged us to think of human beings primarily as analytic machines. But perhaps AI is forcing us to rethink that entire framework. Because if machines become vastly better than us at pure analysis, calculation, memorization and pattern recognition, then what remains uniquely human becomes more visible — not less.
In fact, the danger of the AI age is not that machines will become too human. It is that humans will start trying to become too machinelike.
We already see this happening. People increasingly speak about “optimizing” every dimension of life — sleep, productivity, networking, branding, performance. Students feel pressure to turn themselves into perfectly curated résumés. Workers fear being measured against algorithms that never tire and never sleep. But human flourishing is not — and has never been — about optimization. Human beings are imperfect, gloriously imperfect.
A truly meaningful life is often messy, nonlinear, contradictory, emotional and inefficient. And the people who shape our lives most profoundly are rarely the most optimized. They are the most human, like the teacher who inspired you because she cared deeply. The friend who sat with you for hours during your heartbreak. The parent who sacrificed for decades for her child. The activist who refused to surrender on pain of death. The scientist whose curiosity overcame failure.
Human greatness emerges from struggle. A machine may someday write a technically flawless symphony. But it will never know the anguish of Beethoven, who composed his ninth symphony — one of the greatest pieces of music ever written — when he was almost totally deaf. When we listen to the Ninth, what moves us is not simply the arrangement of notes. It is the sorrow, perseverance and triumph of a composer determined to create transcendent sounds that he would never hear.
That is why HI — human intelligence — matters. Not because it is faster than AI. Not because it is more efficient. But because it is embedded in lived experience. Machines may help us solve problems. But human intelligence still decides what is worth valuing, protecting, building or sacrificing for.
Your generation will live through extraordinary technological change. AI will transform medicine, science, education, transportation, communication and perhaps every profession represented here today. Some types of jobs might change, and entire industries will evolve. But throughout all of this disruption, humans will still hunger for what only humans can provide.
People will still want humans to teach their children; they will want humans to help them overcome illness and pain. Humans to console them in moments of grief. Humans to lead them in times of crisis. Humans to make art that is about our own human condition.
And perhaps most importantly, people will still want to matter to one another. At its core, human life is relational. We engage with other humans, for better and for worse. We seek recognition, dignity, affection and love from other human beings. We cannot get any of that from computers or AI, no matter how powerful they are.
Sometimes we think we can. But the data is now overwhelming and clear; too much engagement with computers and phones makes us lonely and sad. As the scholar Sherry Turkle notes in her book “Alone Together“, we have embraced technology and received the illusion of companionship without the demands or rewards of friendship.
My hope for you is that instead of competing with AI on its terms, AI prompts you to become more fully human.
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