Awe in the Age of AI

Another day, another jaw-dropping feat by AI. Just last month, OpenAI announced that it had solved one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, a set of complex unanswered questions proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Then there was Google DeepMind’s new AlphaGenome Atlas, which predicted the biological effects of all 9 billion possible single-letter changes in the human genome.These feats are awe-inspiring. As are the countless number of milestones and accomplishments each successive AI frontier model has racked up since ChatGPT was launched in 2022. But as we marvel at the machines, what gets crowded out are the humans. While acknowledging the amazing capacity of AI, we shouldn’t lose sight of the irreplaceable value of human-generated awe.Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at Berkeley, studies the impact that experiences of awe have on our physical and mental health. He describes awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.”The triumphs of AI certainly qualify. But one of Keltner’s studies, which looked at 2,600 stories of awe across 26 countries, had a very revealing finding. “What mo...