Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, September 23, 2026

 

Ezra Klein

Produced by Rollin Hu

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far

"I think one of the fundamental questions this gets at is: What is intelligence? Before you can even think about what it means to have intelligent machines, what is intelligence to you?

Well, there’s a technical formulation of intelligence. First of all, when people talk about intelligence and thinking and all of these things, of course there’s no formal definition for most people. But in the field of computer science, there is a formal definition, and the formal definition is perception, which is perceiving the world and understanding it.

Two, which is reasoning — reasoning is the ability to decompose any scenario and anything that you see, any experience, into more elemental parts.

And then third is planning toward an objective. That fundamental formulation applies to agentic systems, it applies to robotic systems — applies to self-driving cars.

And so you could see the industry building it layer by layer by layer, step by step by step, to the point where we now have what we perceive as intelligence."

From Hands to Heads to Hearts; New York Times, 1/4/17

Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times; From Hands to Heads to Hearts:

"Economies get labeled according to the predominant way people create value, pointed out Seidman, also author of the book “How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything.” So, the industrial economy, he noted, “was about hired hands. The knowledge economy was about hired heads. The technology revolution is thrusting us into ‘the human economy,’ which will be more about creating value with hired hearts — all the attributes that can’t be programmed into software, like passion, character and collaborative spirit.”

It’s no surprise that the French government began requiring French companies on Jan. 1 to guarantee their employees a “right to disconnect” from technology — when they are not at work — trying to combat the “always on” work culture.

Leaders, businesses and communities will still leverage technology to gain advantage, but those that put human connection at the center of everything they do — and how they do it — will be the enduring winners, insisted Seidman: “Machines can be programmed to do the next thing right. But only humans can do the next right thing.”"