For someone who used to ride a school bus with Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, Rashida Jones is remarkably earthbound. Growing up in Los Angeles, the daughter of the "Mod Squad" actor Peggy Lipton and the legendary music producer Quincy Jones, she was so ensconced in the world of mega-celebrity that it took a while for her to realize that the people surrounding her--Frank Sinatra, Sidney Poitier, Michael Jackson--were as iconic as they were. That heady milieu would cause most young people (say, her bus-mates) to lose themselves in the fame bubble. Instead, Jones did her homework and got into Harvard, where she studied religion and philosophy, before finding fame on her own, on the sitcoms "The Office" and "Parks and Recreation." In many of her roles, as in her life, she projects a dry, discerning intelligence that cuts through the absurdity surrounding her. She is a very good guide to the world of the famous.

What do our creations think of us? Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 is a language model released by OpenAI in 2020 that uses deep learning to produce text that seems like it could have been written by a human. Taken individually, the AI's lines don't smack much of poetry or strictly cohere, but in aggregate, they gesture at something more. What would it produce if asked to meditate on the human soul and to produce spiritual poetry like ours? What does it think of our religious beliefs?

Here's the recent dinner talk: "So: is AI going to replace humans or not?" The technologist said "Oh, totally." The executive said, "That's not the right question." Even a year ago we would not have been talking about any of this. But here we are: I think the truth is probably that AI is indeed going to replace humans in the workforce in many capacities -- not just on the factory floor.