For all of the advances in artificial intelligence, computers alone will never supersede what creative human minds and computers can accomplish jointly, according to Walter Isaacson, biographer and president of the Aspen Institute and lecturer at the 43rd annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.

"This is what the arts and the humanities teach us and why these realms are as valuable to our education as science, technology, engineering, and math," said Isaacson. "If we humans are to uphold our end of the bargain when it comes to a man-machine symbiosis, if we are going to retain our role as partners with machines, we must continue to nurture the humanities, the wellsprings of our creativity.”

Isaacson was lecturer at the 43rd annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Established in 1972, it is the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, and John Updike are among the past honorees.

In his lecture, "The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences," the 61-year-old Isaacson said that a robust understanding of the humanities would be critical in the next phase of the digital revolution, which will fuse technology with media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, and the arts. The new era will go beyond the current pouring of "old wine"—books, newspapers, songs, movies—into new "digital bottles," he said, and give way to novel forms of expression.

"This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors," Isaacson said.

Those who will rise to the top in this new landscape will be individuals who flourish where the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology intersect and who have a "rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of them all."

Isaacson drew on the lives of great thinkers of recent centuries, including Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and the writer and mathematician Ada Lovelace. Those figures distinguished themselves not solely by their brilliance—smart people are not so uncommon—but by their ability to think differently and to straddle the humanities and the sciences. Einstein, for example, marveled at "nature’s most mundane amazements. His success came from his imagination, rebellious spirit, and his willingness to question authority. These are things the humanities teach.

In 2011, Isaacson wrote himself into the consciousness of a new generation of nonfiction readers with his biography of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple and a demigod in the worlds of consumer technology and product design. The infamously exacting Jobs hand-selected Isaacson for the task, granting the writer dozens of interviews as he battled cancer during the final years of his life. Isaacson has also written biographies of Franklin, Einstein, and Henry Kissinger.

"Jobs understood that the best technology incorporates the arts and humanities He was a genius in understanding how people would related emotionally to their devices," he said. "He understood the emotion, beauty, and simplicity that make for a great human-machine interface."

Isaacson has made himself a lifelong student of brilliant, unconventional characters. He studied literature and history at Harvard University, later continuing his studies as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford. He forged a career as a journalist, joining Time magazine in 1978 and helping to chronicle the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. He served as editor of the magazine from 1996 to 2001, leaving to become chairman and chief executive of the cable news network CNN. In 2003, he was named to his current position as president and chief executive of the Aspen Institute.

This article originated in the Chronicle of Higher Education.