Technology, Idolatry and Centering Humanity

Rachel Gurevitz: While society changes, civilizations evolve, technology changes… the fundamental questions that we tend to ask – they haven’t changed all that much.

Michael Satz: I think an idol is something that we give ultimate worth to that is not ultimate, right?

Erik Dreff: A technical definition would be replacing the bearer of meaning for the actual thing that has the meaning. So technology becoming an idol would be kind of, you know – the worshiping it; it’s the answer to all of our problems; it can eschew or get rid of religion, no longer needed – these types of things. That would be to kind of place it as an idol before us and to have it be the thing that kind of “heralds the new age” or something like that.

Michael Satz: Well, for me, it’s first to look at what our ancestors said. Of course the technology was different 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago – but they’re still asking the essential questions of how to live in the world. And so approaching any question, as, you know, as a Jew, for me, as a rabbi, as a teacher, is to look at what our tradition says, and then “how can it help us?” How can it help us approach the questions we have today [in a way] that’s rooted in wisdom and love?

Jeremy Epstein:  As Jews, we think about tikkun olam. Is this technology making the world a better place or is this technology making the world a worse place?

Rachel Gurevitz : How do we respond to this now being part of the world in a way that it wasn’t before? That’s the conversation we’re having today with artificial intelligence.

Joshua Stanton: One of the core competencies of Judaism is creating limits that help people. And so, approaching AI from the standpoint that it’s going to continue evolving and growing and developing, it’s going to become more and more a part of our lives and more a part of society as a whole – what are the healthy limits? Is a very Jewish approach. It is pragmatic. It understands that unbounded potential, in fact, can lead to real regress. And at the same time, it makes clear that the goal of AI must be helping people. It centers people and their well-being in the conversation in a way that I rarely hear in other circles and in other times.

Natalie Rudolph: I guess asking the question, “Where do you decide this is not good – this is too much –  and this is okay?” Because when you look at it as a continuum, there’s no bright line.

Rachel Gurevitz: It’s asking, “What are the right questions?” So that I’m thinking about the impact of something, not just in [terms of] “How does this tool affect this thing that I designed the tool to work on?” But “how does it affect something that I might not have been directly thinking about in designing the tool?”

[We] talk about that when it comes to things like our mobile phones. Like, it’s an incredible tool to have this computer in your pocket. But I don’t think people were thinking about, when they first created that, the incredible impact it would have had on social connections, [the] loneliness epidemic – some of the things that weren’t about the invention itself, but about the impact of the invention.

Natalie Rudolph: Being able to think systematically about how to ask the questions, how to think about the values that you have, and how to make value judgments – that is fundamental to who we are as people and how we live in communities and protect ourselves.

When I was writing my thesis in rabbinical school, I organized my findings based on a book called Religion and Science, by someone named Ian Barbour. And he talks about four different approaches to science and religion, one being conflict. It’s possible that there are many people who think that’s the default position because there [are] extreme views, and extreme views tend to be sticky.

Many people actually live in the world of independence, where they think the two don’t really speak to one another. And there are people who think that science tells you how things work and religion is speaking to the “why” of things, and the meaning behind things, and the ethics.

But then there are two worlds that I tend to live in, and they’re a little harder to distinguish from one another: The world of complementary, and the world of integration. In the world of complementary, science and religion have something to teach one another. They’re different from one another. There are some distinctions. But the questions that religion asks are questions that science should pick up and think about.

Questions like the origin of the universe, and questions like “What does it mean to act in a good way? And is there a way to even think about that from a perspective of science?” The world of integration is more or less the same idea, but with a different end. The question of “is there a future synthesis in which we’re all talking about the same thing?” It’s an almost messianic vision that both science and religion can have.

And when I think about the world as I hope it becomes – the world that I’m trying to be a hand in creating – it’s a world in which everything we learn, no matter where we learn it, that is true is what I would call Torah – whether it’s from science or whether it’s from the thought that can come from a long religious tradition of asking questions. It is all working toward a bettering of the world that I think – in my language, as a rabbi – God is hoping that we are able to achieve.

Ari Kaiman: When the questions about artificial intelligence began to hit popular culture in a way that was feeling like a tipping point, we all came to realize that the religious conversation was an important one to have. For the very first time, we have created a tool that can self-create, that can improve itself – a tool that collects human knowledge, and, better than humans – at least in the future, if not already – can make that knowledge synthesize and emerge in new ways that we hadn’t thought of before.

And a tool like this might be something akin to the Tower of Babel – the time in human history  (in our mythical tradition, in the Torah) when human beings could accomplish anything they wanted to. The question is, what are we trying to accomplish now? What power have we created? And how does it relate to all of the religious ideas and the categories that we’ve created?

Jonathan Crane: Most of the tools that humans have constructed are ones that we have mastery over, that we are the ones who can control them, and we deploy them – typically for good. Oftentimes or sometimes a simple tool can then also be deployed for harm. Now we’ve created a different class of tool that, as the Rabbi said, can instruct itself and it can improve itself.

It could very well become a master in its own right, independent of human intervention. And so the relationship of power vis-a-vis this new technology, this new tool, is going to be tested. And we wanted to provide venues throughout the year for us to meditate on “What is our relationship to power?” – conventionally, traditionally – and then what will it be with this new phenomenon that we call AI?