Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Recently, Jensen Huong, CEO and co-founder of Navidia, was asked the name the smartest person he knew.

He replied by suggesting that the meaning of smart has been made obsolete by machines.

He then offered this updated definition, quote,

I think long term the definition of smart is someone who sits at the intersection

of being technically astute but human empathy

and having the ability to infer the unspoken around the corners, the unknowables, end quote.

Recently, my Colson Center colleague Glenn Sunshine suggested that if a scholar from hundreds

of years ago was shown what AI could do, he'd be both impressed but also disappointed.

You know a lot, he might observe, but you understand nothing.

You see, as much as our machines can do, more is not always better.

Having all the information and all the data from history, science, literature, art, philosophy,

and medicine from across the centuries constantly accessible at our fingertips is not making

us wiser.

Last month, a quote from the novel, Dune went viral on X. It read this,

quote, once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.

But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them, end quote.

Now, of course, Frank Herbert, who wrote that sci-fi series, was basically repeating an earlier observation from C.S. Lewis.

Also, in a recent controversial essay entitled Something Big Is Happening, the CEO of Otherside AI, Matt Schumer, sparked an intense and wide-ranging conversation with this Stark admission, quote, I'm no longer needed for the actual

technical work of my job. I describe what I want built in plain English and it just appears. Not a

rough draft I need to fix, the finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my

...