Skip to content

How Humans Can Put Machines to Shame

Being funny, being sexy or expressing a loving sentiment – that’s the cutting edge of human intelligence. 
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Sometimes people think that emotion and art are sort of sideshows to human intelligence and the real essence of intelligence is thinking logically. 


If that were true, computers are already smarter than we are because they’re much better at logical thinking than we are.  It’s actually things like being funny, being sexy or expressing a loving sentiment; maybe in a poem or in a musical piece.  That’s the cutting edge of human intelligence. 

That’s what today humans are still better than machines.  And the reason for it is they can say we can think with our neocortex with a greater number of levels of this conceptual hierarchy.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Related
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur in sem nisi. Donec at convallis felis. Curabitur id mattis libero. Nunc maximus dolor eget iaculis lobortis. Mauris eros mi, mattis […]
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aenean volutpat ultricies nibh, ac placerat urna. Vivamus augue arcu, consectetur vitae est mollis, laoreet congue ante. Quisque a aliquet eros, ac […]
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla finibus bibendum ligula, malesuada placerat libero vehicula vestibulum. Nulla ut tincidunt arcu, quis scelerisque dolor. Nunc pretium justo tristique nunc eleifend, […]

Up Next
People often conflate the conditions of happiness with material wellbeing.  There’s lots of evidence that there’s no connection at all.