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.

-Fareed Zakaria in the WaPost