Ark & Tower: Two Models For Digital Futurism
Tech Tribe Dispatch #273
💡 Think:
Will technology redeem us? Or destroy us?
This week’s Torah portion shares two paradigms of revolutionary technology transforming the world - one for the good, the other for the opposite.
Redemptive Tech
The first innovation in this week’s Torah portion is the Ark. In the face of impending destruction of life on Earth, G-d commands Noah to undertake a massive project - building the Ark to preserve life on the planet.
Indeed the very flood itself is comparable to the revolution of wisdom, secular and spiritual, that took place at the dawn of the Modern era.
“In the six hundredth year of Noach’s life… all the wellsprings of the awesome depths of the earth burst forth and the portals of heaven opened.1”
Riffing on the chronology of Noah’s life, the Zohar compares the wellsprings that burst forth to the revelation of knowledge in the modern era.
”In the six hundredth year of the sixth millennium, the floodgates of supernal wisdom will open and the wellsprings of lower wisdom will burst forth, to prepare the world to enter the seventh millennium.2”
Just as the divine wisdom of the 18th century, the revolution of the Chasidic movement, is a key stage in revealing the redemptive potential of this world, so too the secular wisdom of the industrial revolution and eventual computer age, is redemptive in nature.
“The world was not worthy to use gold,” the rabbis tell us in the midrash. “So, why was it created? For the Tabernacle and the Holy Temple.”
Like those golden sanctums of divine revelation, technology and all its scientific underpinnings exist to help us experience divine ethics and wisdom so we may journey ever higher toward the sublime. It’s up to each of us to reveal the potential of this golden gift by helping our fellow humans find serenity and discover meaning and purpose.
A flood is a massively destructive force - but an ark can channel the water - uplifting and saving all those inside.
Distructive Tech
All of this stands against the second technological innovation of the portion: The Tower of Babel, fueled by the revolution of brick making.
Like the ark, the tower was meant to save humanity from a future cataclysmic flood.
As sages note in the Midrash3,“they said, “Once every 1656 years (the period between the Creation and the Flood) the skies collapse, as they did during the Flood. Let us make supports for them.”
Yet this technology did not result in human salvation. Instead, their language was fractured and humanity “dispersed over all the face of the earth.4”
Ends or Means?
What separates these two technologies?
Both were focused on utilizing emergent technologies to preserve life on Earth.
The rabbis note in the Midrash5 a fascinating tidbit about the Tower’s construction:
“Rabbi Pinchas said: There were no stones in Babel to build the city and the tower. What did they do? They formed bricks, baked them, and built with them until they built it seven kilometers high…
If a man fell and died, they paid no heed to him, but if a brick fell, they sat down and wept and said: Woe is us! When will we get another brick up there to replace it?”
Whereas the the ark was focused on its human cargo, the tower project became enraptured with the technology it was building. The humanity that is critical at the core of any societal advancement was lost for the product being created. The perhaps lofty goal of societal advancement had superseded the humanity it was meant to help… until when the bricks fell, they wept.
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📚 Read:
🗼 Is AI the New Tower of Babel? Can we get it right this time?
🍃 The Case of the Headless Man and Insufficient Repentance. An explanation of the art.
🔢 A Calculator’s Most Important Button Has Been Removed
✍🏻 How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative
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Bereshit Rabbah 38:6.
Pirkei D’Rabi Eliezer 24:6. See Tzvi Freeman’s Is AI the New Tower of Babel? for further discussion of this Midrash.