Human Intelligence When Machines Can Think [Video] Part 5

Two Old Cuban Execs, Episode 5,

Find part 4 here:

2 Old Cubans: AI Is Here Be Prepared or Be Left Outside [Video]

Part 3 here:

2 Old Cuban US Tech Execs Discuss AI Adoption [Video] Part 3

Part 2 here:

From AI Hype to Reality: Building the Zero-Latency [Video] Part 2

Part 1 here:

Two Hispanic Cuban- American Technologists Talk AI [Video]

Video summary:

In the fifth episode of Two Old Cuban Execs, longtime friends and technology veterans Irving Wladawsky-Berger (MIT Research Affiliate, former IBM) and Honorio Padron (7x CIO/CTO, former NASA and C3 AI) step away from enterprise strategy to ask a more personal question: what actually makes us human once machines can seemently think?

Both hosts left Cuba as teenagers, built decades long careers navigating the personal computer revolution, the internet, and now AI, and bring that lived perspective to a conversation that gets more pointed than usual. They open by tackling how the industry talks about AI itself. When a model gets something wrong, Wladawsky-Berger argues, calling it a “hallucination” wrongly implies intent. It is a tool that was not tested enough, not a mind that chose to lie.

From there the conversation turns to education.

Padron shares the story of a close friend’s daughter who completed a $300,000 business degree with almost no AI coursework, only to face AI fluency questions in nearly every job interview since graduating. Both hosts argue schools are caught between fear of cheating and a job market that already assumes AI literacy, and that institutions slow to adapt are doing their students a disservice.

The episode’s central debate centers on research identifying five capabilities said to remain distinctly human even as AI advances: empathy, presence, judgment, creativity, and vision. Padron challenges the durability of that list on air, arguing each capability is really a byproduct of sensing, memory, training, and compute, constraints AI is closing quickly. His conclusion: the lasting human role may not be thinking better than AI, but retaining the authority to decide, and even that authority is not guaranteed to stay human by default.

The hosts close with a shared, direct message for viewers of any age: free AI training is abundant online, and there is no excuse for waiting on an employer or an institution to provide it.