When you examine the lives of history's most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days. Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest "working" hours. How did they manage to be so accomplished? Can a generation raised to believe that 80-hour workweeks are necessary for success learn something from the lives of the people who laid the foundations of chaos theory and topology or wrote Great Expectations? If some of history's greatest figures didn't put in immensely long hours, maybe the key to unlocking the secret of their creativity lies in understanding not just how they labored but how they rested, and how the two relate. Let's start by looking at the lives of two figures. They were both very accomplished in their fields.

Yuval Noah Harari's first book, Sapiens, was an international sensation. The Israeli historian's mind-bending tour through the triumph of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. His new book, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, is about what comes next for humanity -- and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future. I spoke with Harari recently for my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. To hear our whole conversation, subscribe on iTunes (or wherever you get your podcasts) or stream it off SoundCloud. In this excerpt, which has been edited for length and clarity, Harari and I discuss the rise of artificial intelligence, whether digital consciousness is a necessary byproduct of digital intelligence, and what it will all mean for human beings. As you'll see, I'm a bit less convinced than Harari is that the computers are coming for our jobs, and that human beings are on the edge of economic uselessness.

When my mother's mother was in her early twenties, a century ago, a suitor took her duck hunting in a rowboat on a lake near Austin, Texas, where she grew up. He steadied his shotgun by resting the barrel on her right shoulder--she was sitting in the bow--and when he fired he not only missed the duck but also permanently damaged her hearing, especially on that side. The loss became more severe as she got older, and by the time I was in college she was having serious trouble with telephones. Her deafness probably contributed to one of her many eccentricities: ending phone conversations by suddenly hanging up. I'm a grandparent myself now, and lots of people I know have hearing problems. A guy I played golf with last year came close to making a hole in one, then complained that no one in our foursome had complimented him on his shot--even though, a moment before, all three of us had complimented him on his shot. The man who cuts my wife's hair began wearing two hearing aids recently, to compensate for damage that he attributes to years of exposure to professional-quality blow-dryers. My sister has hearing aids, too. She traces her problem to repeatedly listening at maximum volume to Anne's Angry and Bitter Breakup Song Playlist, which she created while going through a divorce. My ears ring all the time--a condition called tinnitus.

On a velvety March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear's living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the secrets of longevity. When the symposium's first speaker asked how many people there wanted to live to two hundred, if they could remain healthy, almost every hand went up. The venture capitalists were keeping slim to maintain their imposing vitality, the scientists were keeping slim because they'd read--and in some cases done--the research on caloric restriction, and the Hollywood stars were keeping slim because of course. When Liz Blackburn, who won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics, took questions, Goldie Hawn, regal on a comfy sofa, purred, "I have a question about the mitochondria. I've been told about a molecule called glutathione that helps the health of the cell?" Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that protects cells and their mitochondria, which provide energy; some in Hollywood call it "the God molecule." But taken in excess it can muffle a number of bodily repair mechanisms, leading to liver and kidney problems or even the rapid and potentially fatal sloughing of your skin. Blackburn gently suggested that a varied, healthy diet was best, and that no single molecule was the answer to the puzzle of aging. Yet the premise of the evening was that answers, and maybe even an encompassing solution, were just around the corner. The party was the kickoff event for the National Academy of Medicine's Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity, which will award at least twenty-five million dollars for breakthroughs in the field. Victor Dzau, the academy's president, stood to acknowledge several of the scientists in the room. He praised their work with enzymes that help regulate aging; with teasing out genes that control life span in various dog breeds; and with a technique by which an old mouse is surgically connected to a young mouse, shares its blood, and within weeks becomes younger. Joon Yun, a doctor who runs a health-care hedge fund, announced that he and his wife had given the first two million dollars toward funding the challenge. "I have the idea that aging is plastic, that it's encoded," he said. "If something is encoded, you can crack the code." To growing applause, he went on, "If you can crack the code, you can hack the code!" It's a big ask: more than a hundred and fifty thousand people die every day, the majority of aging-related diseases. Yet Yun believes, he told me, that if we hack the code correctly, "thermodynamically, there should be no reason we can't defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever." Nicole Shanahan, the founder of a patent-management business, announced that her company would oversee longevity-related patents that Yun had pledged to the cause.

One evening last November, a fifty-four-year-old woman from the Bronx arrived at the emergency room at Columbia University's medical center with a grinding headache. Her vision had become blurry, she told the E.R. doctors, and her left hand felt numb and weak. The doctors examined her and ordered a CT scan of her head. A few months later, on a morning this January, a team of four radiologists-in-training huddled in front of a computer in a third-floor room of the hospital. The room was windowless and dark, aside from the light from the screen, which looked as if it had been filtered through seawater. The residents filled a cubicle, and Angela Lignelli-Dipple, the chief of neuroradiology at Columbia, stood behind them with a pencil and pad. She was training them to read CT scans. "It's easy to diagnose a stroke once the brain is dead and gray," she said. "The trick is to diagnose the stroke before too many nerve cells begin to die." Strokes are usually caused by blockages or bleeds, and a neuroradiologist has about a forty-five-minute window to make a diagnosis, so that doctors might be able to intervene--to dissolve a growing clot, say. "Imagine you are in the E.R.," Lignelli-Dipple continued, raising the ante. "Every minute that passes, some part of the brain is dying. Time lost is brain lost." She glanced at a clock on the wall, as the seconds ticked by. "So where's the problem?" she asked. The blood supply to the brain branches left and right and then breaks into rivulets and tributaries on each side. A clot or a bleed usually affects only one of these branches, leading to a one-sided deficit in a part of the brain. As the nerve cells lose their blood supply and die, the tissue swells subtly.

It's not yet clear whether, with the rise of artificial intelligence, workforce automation will lead to an overall rise or drop in human job creation. That's the argument put forward by University of Geneva professor and tax lawyer Xavier Oberson. Oberson argues that as robots take over more and more jobs – particularly in the industry and service sectors – there will be a rise in unemployment and a corresponding drop in tax and social security receipts by governments all over the world. He believes that imposing a tax on work done by robots could help offset these losses. Logistically, he says this could be managed by creating a "legal entity" representing robots, just as is done today for corporations.

Artificial intelligence is all around. Tech giants and startups are cultivating their AI technology to create better ways of living such as riding on driverless cars and making payment by scanning your face. While this lies on the grounds that AI's practical skills can ultimately replace human labor, one startup believes that AI can be an emotional companion to human. Shanghai-based startup Emotibot made an AI-powered bot that can complete practical tasks as well as have a conversation with you. Corporates who want more customer interaction are in talk with the company to source their technology to humanize their online customer service.

"The game isn't going to tell you if you got that right." It's an ominous way to start a game demo, but one I'm not too surprised by after playing 80 Days and Sorcery! Heaven's Vault is Inkle's new game, and I met up with studio co-founders Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey recently to get some hands-on time. At first glance it's a huge step away from Inkle's previous games--where 80 Days and Sorcery mostly played out in text, Heaven's Vault features fully navigable 3D environments. Your character Aliya Elasra is 2D though, her movements more suggested by a series of still frames than fully animated.

Instead, they might ask their Amazon Alexa, Apple's Siri or a text-based chatbot for help. This week, GSA launched a pilot that would walk federal agencies through the process of setting up virtual assistants, powered by machine-learning and artificial intelligence technology, which can eventually be deployed to citizens. The goal isn't just to produce more "intelligent personal assistants," or IPAs, GSA's Emerging Citizen Technology Office lead Justin Herman told Nextgov. It's also to build out a structure internally, complete with toolkits and guides, so agencies can decide for themselves whether this technology is worthwhile, he explained. "The easiest part of this is actually building them," Herman added.

Images produced with innovation engines were not only accepted to a selective art competition and displayed at the University of Wyoming Art Museum, but they also were among the 21% of submissions that won an award. It is not unusual to hear a student is taking an advanced placement computer science (AP CS) course these days, but eyebrows raise when Jackeline Mendez tells people about it, because Mendez is a senior at Boston Arts Academy where, as the name implies, the emphasis is on the arts. "I had a free block, and I was surprised how [computer science is] more than just systems and machines and the Internet," explains Mendez, who plans to major in physics in college. "People have a mind set that it's machines, but it's really not. It's what the world is right now. We use computer science for everything."