Tag: Yuval Noah Harari

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AI Will Never Be Human – Bemidbar 5783

Artificial intelligence illustration with blue text AI over binary code matrix background. Abstract concept of cyber technology and automation

There has been much concern lately about artificial intelligence. You may have heard that last week a Senate subcommittee hosted the CEO of OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, Sam Altman. In his testimony, Altman (who is, BTW, a nice Jewish boy from St. Louis) actually asked the Senate to regulate AI. Many tech companies have zealously fought against regulation, so to hear Mr. Altman express concern about the potential dangers of AI and to seek regulatory controls may have been a relief for some. 

But the complicated part, and perhaps Mr. Altman is gambling on this, is that (a) Congress moves much more slowly than the rate at which widespread use of AI is unfolding, and (b) it is not immediately clear how exactly to regulate it. The devil (not that we Jews believe in such a thing) is in the details.

Nonetheless, this is clearly something to which Jews, as people whose tradition teaches us to be responsible for humanity and our world, should be paying attention.

Speaking of details, Parashat Bemidbar opens with a commandment to count people, to take a census of the Israelites while they are encamped in the wilderness, for the purposes of determining the fighting strength of their army. Much of the parashah is dedicated to these numbers.

This report of numbers by tribe might appear as a dull, bureaucratic endeavor which obscures the personhood of all of those counted, not to mention the women and people under the age of 20 who are not even counted. The first three chapters of Bemidbar come off looking something like the tape from an adding machine – lots of numbers and then a bottom line, which in this case is 603,550. (The extrapolated estimate of the entire population who left Egypt is therefore about two million, which seems like an impossibly high number. But far be it from me to say that something in the Torah is not true…) 

But here’s something that you might miss if you are not looking closely. The Hebrew instruction to perform this census is phrased thus (Bemidbar / Numbers 1:2):

שְׂא֗וּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ֙ כׇּל־עֲדַ֣ת בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל

Se-u et rosh kol adat benei Yisra-el

Now, your translation of this verse in the Etz Hayyim ḥumash says, “Take a census of the whole Israelite company.” But the Hebrew speaks idiomatically. A more literal translation is “Lift up the head of the entire group of Israelites.” The suggestion of “lifting up the head” sounds much more personal: Do not merely count heads; lift them up. Take each individual’s face into account. Acknowledge each member of the group as a human being, and as part of the greater whole. As if to drive the point home, the passages about counting are followed by the  the birkat kohanim, the Priestly Blessing of Bemidbar / Numbers 6:24-26, which occurs in Parashat Naso (which we won’t get to until the week after Shavu’ot). The third verse is as follows:

יִשָּׂ֨א ה’ ׀ פָּנָיו֙ אֵלֶ֔יךָ וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם׃

Yisa Adonai panav elekha veyasem lekha shalom.
May God lift up God’s face to you and grant you peace.

It’s the same verb: נשא / to lift up. 

When it comes to counting people, the details matter. It’s not just a strip of adding tape. Every one of us counts. Every one of us must be acknowledged and lifted up.

A brief report caught my eye this week, regarding the state of religion in America. An organization called the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) published the results of a recent survey of Americans’ attachment to religion. And, as you might expect, the percentage of us for whom religion is important is going down, and the number of unaffiliated folks continues to rise. 

And the Jews, of course, are the same as everybody else, only more so. 

Now, you certainly have all heard me make the case for the value of Judaism, if not religious practice in general, and I don’t need to do that right now. (But just wait until Rosh HaShanah!). Some of the statistics in this report show that people who attend religious services at least a few times a year tend to be more engaged in civic and political activities, particularly those things where people gather and work together. And I think we all know from anecdotal evidence that religious practice actually induces pro-social behavior in many of us.

So all the more so: religion brings people together, and is good for us as individuals and for society. It lifts us up, and helps us to see each other’s faces and acknowledge our shared humanity. And every one of us counts.

Nowadays, we have many fancy adding machines which help us through our lives: silicon slaves which do our bidding, and can help us achieve things which our ancestors could not even have imagined. 

The Israeli historian and social philosopher Yuval Noah Harari opens his book Homo Deus with an explanation for why people no longer need religion: because we have effectively vanquished plague, famine, and war. Yes, we have just been through a minor plague, and war is clearly still around, but the numbers of people who perish due to these things is far fewer than did so in previous centuries. Harari argues that our ability to live and thrive and not be so concerned on a daily basis for matters of life and death have obviated the need for religion, and for God. And indeed, when we have created tools such as artificial intelligence which may seem to have personality, perhaps we have achieved the status of Homo Deus, of God-like people. 

Sam Altman, in his testimony on Capitol Hill, pointed to the fact that when Photoshop was first introduced, it fooled some people initially, but we quickly learned to distinguish between an actual photo and something which had been altered. That sort of technology will of course continue to improve, and I am certain that it is only a matter of time before our adding machines will be able to deceive us in ways we would never have considered before.

And so too with language models like ChatGPT. They may ultimately sound human. But I do not believe that they will ever replace actual humans. And they will certainly never possess the Divine spark that is at the core of each of us.

ChatGPT will never be able to make a minyan. AI will never be able to give a proper hug to comfort those who mourn. It will never be able to get up and dance with joy as we name a new baby or celebrate a couple who is about to be married. It will not seek atonement on Yom Kippur, or sing moving melodies that turn the heart to God, or pray silently or yearn for God’s presence as we welcome Shabbat with Yedid Nefesh. A computer will never understand the value of Shabbat, or the conscious choice to take the holy opportunities of Jewish life, which give our lives framework and meaning.

Rabbi Danny Schiff, toward the end of his book, Judaism in a Digital Age, which we will be discussing after qiddush, addresses the question of whether the future necessitates a human presence. He writes,

Judaism’s answer to this question is yes. No matter how animated, intelligent, responsive, or reliable our AI creations might become, AI will never attain the combination of qualities that will merit the status of being “created in the image” [betzelem Elohim, a reference to Bereshit / Genesis 1:28]… The gulf between achieving convincing human-like qualities and being human is almost certainly unbridgeable. Jews are mandated to expand the Divine image in the world, not to lessen it. That goal demands the preservation of humanity. Judaism provides no license to contemplate an alternative… The irreplaceable human perspective and the poetry inherent within the grandeur and the struggle of human existence are exquisite… Each human life contains the potential for untold significance, and that will remain true even if AI comes to be viewed as functionally superior.

Put more bluntly, our devices may count us. But no computer will ever lift up our heads and appreciate the fullness of our humanity, of who we are as individuals and as the significant constituent parts of a human collective. 

And furthermore, no amount of technological modification of the human body or mind will make us God-like. God is far too elusive to enable that. Contrary to what Yuval Harari says, the need for religion – for Judaism – will never go away. We will always need to yearn together, to mourn together, to gather for prayer and celebration and comfort. We will always need a transcendent framework which brings us back to the spark of Divinity; no microchip will ever be able to recreate that.

ChatGPT, Google Bard, or whatever else comes after them will surely know Torah. They will be able to recite gemara with ease and probably teach and interpret for knowledgeable Jewish people. But they will hardly be able to convincingly sing ‘Etz ḥayyim hi lamaḥaziqim bah” / The Torah is a tree of life for those who grasp it.

Our strength comes from grasping the words of Torah. And we let that go at our peril. So we just might have to keep holding onto and holding up our tradition, paying attention to the details, and lifting our heads together for the sake of humanity.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 5/20/2023.)

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The Trust Deficit – Va-era 5782

Like so many other people I tested positive this week, and I am fortunate that due to the fact that I am vaccinated and boosted, I have experienced a mild case of Covid-19 – a sore throat and some congestion. Thank God for the human ingenuity that has produced vaccines. (And it’s worth it to remind you all that if you are not boosted, you really should be: Friday mornings – walk-in at the JCC in Squirrel Hill.)

A curious bit of fake news came across my computer screen this week. It was an article about a fake New York Times headline, which read, “Teachers Should Tolerate Bullying Towards Unvaccinated Students.” It seems that somebody out there with nefarious intent wanted to rile up people who are anti-vaccine, and produced a mock-up of a NYT opinion piece suggesting violence against the unvaccinated. 

Now, of course, there are people out there who will believe anything that they see on the Internet, and of course will repost or retweet extreme content. So as ridiculous as this sounds, the fake headline traveled far enough, provoking its intended reaction, for there to be a genuine news article about it.

The challenge here is that we have reached a point where many of us are willing to believe anything that fits our particular worldview, and not to trust anything that does not. The entire world, it seems, is having trust issues. 

Whom do we trust?

I feel this affecting my own behavior: I was recently shopping online for KN95 masks, and I found myself thinking, how do I know that these are really manufactured to the N95 standard, meaning that it filters out 95% of airborne particles? I certainly cannot test that myself. Am I buying a genuine product?

I read elsewhere that a survey determined that 1 in 5 Americans say that it is acceptable to fake one’s vaccination status to keep a job. One might extrapolate that, kal vaḥomer, all the more so for people who are out for a night on the town, where the stakes might be even lower. This does not breed confidence in our fellow human beings.

Maybe the reason I contracted the virus is because the KN95 that I have been wearing in public is not legit, and the people around me who claim to be fully vaccinated are not. Who knows?

Parashat Va-era, from which we read today, includes a handful of questions surrounding trust. As God gives Moshe his mission to liberate the Israelites from the grip of Egyptian slavery, the text challenges us to wonder, does Moshe trust God? Does Pharaoh trust Moshe and Aharon? Does Moshe trust in himself? Will the Israelites trust Moshe, or God? And so forth.

Tied into all of this are the questions surrounding God’s name. Last week, in Parashat Shemot, we encountered in the burning bush episode one take on the name when Moshe seeks to be reassured about the trustworthiness of this whole operation. He asks God directly (Shemot / Exodus 3:13), “When I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?”

Exodus: Moses and the Burning Bush, Marc Chagall, 1966

God answers, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh.” Not easily translatable, we might read this as “I am what I am.” Not so reassuring, right? 

And this week in Va-era, God does not wait to be asked. The parashah opens with, (Shemot / Exodus 6:3)

וָאֵרָ֗א אֶל־אַבְרָהָ֛ם אֶל־יִצְחָ֥ק וְאֶֽל־יַעֲקֹ֖ב בְּאֵ֣ל שַׁדָּ֑י וּשְׁמִ֣י י-הֹוה לֹ֥א נוֹדַ֖עְתִּי לָהֶֽם׃

I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name י-הוה [YHWH].

In both cases, the names given are apparently conjugations of the verb, “to be.” That is, God’s very name is a form of existence. 

And, as you may have heard me mention before, all of those forms of God’s name, and in particular the Hebrew yod/heh/vav/heh which we often express as YHWH, consist of consonants that are formed only from breath. (In ancient Hebrew, as with contemporary Arabic, the “vav” is actually a “w” – hence “waw”.) With all of those letters, no part of the tongue or lips or teeth obstruct the flow of air to create a percussive sound. In fact, all of these letters, alef – heh – waw – yod, serve as so-called matres lectionis, the fancy Latin term that Bible scholars use to describe consonants that sometimes serve as vowels. 

If God’s name consists solely of breath, then, how indeed might we be able to trust this mysterious character who somehow surfaces in an inflamed shrubbery in the desert?

Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the point is that trust in God is elusive. There will never be a hard consonant in God’s name because you will never be able to see God, to touch God, to perceive a solid surface or a concrete hint of God’s existence. Maybe the point is that the Torah wants us to take the proverbial leap of faith, to trust in something ethereal, because that is sometimes how life works. 

It is, after all, trust in the unseen which has held people together throughout our history. In his monumental review of human history, Sapiens, the Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari points out that basic trust between people erodes in groups larger than 150, since that is the human limit on close acquaintances, and therefore the only way to create trust between people in any larger group is by sharing a common story: 

Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins.  

Harari is an atheist; he pointedly denies the existence of God. But he speaks to the power which the very idea of God has. Or the ideas of a specific shared culture, or state, or peoplehood, or judicial system, or currency. 

Harari’s observation implies that trust in God yields trust in each other. If I know that you are an observant Jew, even if you are from far away and speak a different language and prefer ghormeh sabzi to gefilte fish, then we share a common bond. We adhere to the same traditions, we trust in the same God, and therefore I can trust you.

A fundamental challenge that we are facing today, particularly with the decline of religion, is a decline in trust. In a world that is rapidly transcending statehood, peoplehood, and shared theological principles, how will we trust one another? Will we be able to maintain nation-states, let alone synagogues, if we cannot trust the information we receive? Without a shared story, we have chaos.

The cynics among us will say that it is the bad actors in our world who are creating the trust deficit: Russian or Chinese or Iranian spies, or evil politicians or corrupt public health officials or mad scientists or soulless corporations. But consider how we live today: We are all living in our own silos. We are far removed from where our food is produced, from where our clothing is manufactured, from where our policies are made. And, of course, we are far removed from where our information is emanating, and we often lack the skill, the time, and the patience to verify it. So how can we trust anything?

There will not be a burning bush to show us the truth. 

I look out at the future, at the potentially untrustworthy landscape before us, and I can see only one thing that can help us return to a state of trust. And this may be because I am a rabbi, but we have to lean into the traditional institutions that we have, ailing though they are: religious observance. Trust in and fear of God. The democratic processes of our nation. Our sense of shared peoplehoods – the Jewish one, of course, but also the American one, and all the ways we express those relationships. Our sense of the common good. 

As much as the forces of chaos want to tear these institutions down, as much as each of those institutions are flawed in their own way, a future without them seems bleak indeed.

We need to support, and likely re-imagine, the institutions that we still have, while we still can. We need to uphold the principles we have received: of democracy, of learning and teaching our tradition, of prayer and academic inquiry and shared culture and music and all the things that build trust between people. 

It is inscribed on every dollar bill, a reminder that trust intersects with theology, commerce, and nation at every turn, the official motto of the United States of America: In God We Trust. You won’t find that on any cryptocurrency.

If we cannot live by that motto, I am not sure we can live together at all. 

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 1/1/2022.)