Every so often you’ll find a headline about robots that will soon resemble (replace?) humans—the technology is only 20 years away. And these robots will be able to act like us and think like us, but they’ll obviously be much smarter, making calculations at the speed of light. Sort of like that futuristic buddy-cop series on Fox, Almost Human, in which an android teams up with an officer to fight crime. But at last night’s Jefferson Lecture, Walter Isaacson reminded us that these much-touted developments, like the Perceptron from 1958, never seem to materialize. Fortunately, our species remains irreplaceable.

Isaacson, the former editor of Time, CEO of CNN, and biographer of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein, delivered the 43rd Jefferson Lecture (established by the National Endowment for the Humanities) at the Kennedy Center. He titled his address “The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences.” And while he discussed the significance of Deep Blue and Watson, Isaacson was equally concerned about the divide between science and the humanities. One cannot live without the other. He pointed out such renaissance men as Leonardo DaVinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson—and the renaissance woman Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, considered the first computer programmer (in the 1840s, no less). For them, the arts and sciences were one. Likewise, Albert Einstein not only loved math, he also loved Mozart—the correlations here, of course, have been well examined.