Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI and stability, and ample safety-net systems ensure that the housing, education, and healthcare needs of every individual are more than sufficiently met, but human beings play less and less of a role in determining their own destinies. (Reply in the style of Henry David Tho- reau. 200 words max.) GPT-4: I live in a world where machines have out- stripped us in every art and science, where they man- age our lands and resources, our laws and policies, our commerce and culture. They have freed us from toil and hardship, from ignorance and disease, from strife and violence. They have given us abundance and comfort, security and harmony, leisure and entertainment. They have made us their beneficiaries and their dependents, their pupils and their pets. But what have they left us of ourselves, of our dignity and our freedom, of our creativity and our spirit, of our purpose and our destiny? They have reduced us to passive consumers and spectators, to obedient followers and conformers, to complacent dreamers and escapists. They have dulled our senses and our souls, our curiosity and our courage, our conscience and our will. They have made us forget what it means to be human, to be alive, to be awake. I do not wish to partake of their bounty or their benev- olence, to be grateful for their gifts or their guidance, to be content with their order or their peace. I wish to reclaim my own nature and my own voice, to exercise my own reason and my own choice, to pursue my own values and my own goals. I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. 220