David Brooks: prediction

Transcript context

…Then it rises to the occasion. Indeed, it’s brilliant in that case. It’s a fricking moron. What I do is, I assign it voices. What does Jean Piaget say about this? Does he disagree with Erik Erikson about this? If you assign it to a voice, then you can screen out a lot. But I still have found it basically useless for my own research. It’s great as a travel agent. It’s great at a lot of things, but in humanistic inquiry, I find it pretty pathetic. I do a lot of interviewing, as you do, with AI folks. I was at OpenAI several months ago, and somebody said, “We’re going to create a machine that can think like a human brain.” I call my neuroscientist friends, and they say, “Well, that’ll be a neat trick because we don’t know how human brains think. ” I think AI is a great tool, but I’m unthreatened by it because I don’t think it has understanding, I don’t think it has judgment, I don’t think it has emotion, I don’t think it has motivation. I don’t think it has most of the stuff that the human mind has. It’ll teach us what we’re good at by reminding it what it can’t do. If you asked it to write a 900-word column on a topic you would write on and asked it to be like you — let’s say this is the o3 model from OpenAI — and then you ran it through Claude to improve the writing style. How good does that result, in your —…

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