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The human is not a means to an output. The human is the point.

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In my previous post I wrote that if we define human value as whatever today’s system cannot do, we will be forced to retreat each time the capability boundary moves [ 1 ]. Since then I have discussed the question with friends, colleagues, and family, and one reply kept returning. In many activities, they said, the human is not a means to an output. The human is the point. Chess is the cleanest example. Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997 [ 2 ], and no human has been competitive with the strongest engines for two decades. Yet human chess did not shrink. Chess.com passed 100 million members in December 2022 and 250 million in February 2026 [ 3 ]. Engines serve as tools and commentators, but the games people watch are Carlsen against Nakamura, not one engine against another. In April 2025, humanoid robots ran the Beijing half-marathon alongside people. The fastest robot finished in 2:40:42, the fastest human in 1:02, and the robots were followed as a curiosity rather than as rivals [...
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What Should the Human Part of Science Become?

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1. The change is already inside the field I have been thinking about AI and research less as a distant forecast and more as a change in the texture of an ordinary working day. A calculation that once took an afternoon can be checked in minutes. A counterexample that might have emerged after several conversations can appear in the first serious exchange with a model. Code can be written, tested, and changed while the mathematical idea is still forming. Literature from a neighboring area can be entered without first learning all of its local shorthand. None of these uses is completely reliable, but together they change what it feels like to start and pursue a research problem. Two recent talks helped sharpen the question for me. Hsin-Yuan (Robert) Huang framed the automation of research as an open problem for researchers themselves: what should remain valuable, and how should scientific practice respond when parts of it can be automated [ 1 ]? Terence Tao’s ICM lecture asked a...
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