Do Androids Dream of Matzah Ball Soup?
Tech Tribe Dispatch 157
💡 Think:
From DALL·E 2’s menagerie of marvels to the excitement around LaMDA AI and the debate of its quasi-spiritual sentience, there’s a chance to look at the Jewish nature of bots and AIs and if they can have Jewish souls.
After all, there is a very Jewish origin to the term robot: The golem of Prague, the guardian of Bohemian Jewry created by the Maharal, may have inspired Czech playwright Karel Capek’s R.U.R., the play that gave us the word “robot.”
But can you make a minyan of droids?
In typical rabbinic fashion, the answer to this question is another question: What is it that makes us Jewish?
The Torah begins with the creation of Adam, noting that G-d “blew into his nostrils a soul of life.” It is that innermost “breath” of the Creator that makes us all human. For Jews, that ineffable spark also makes us Jewish.
Rava, the Talmud notes, created a man, a golem, using forces of sanctity. Rava sent his creation before Rabbi Zeira. Rabbi Zeira would speak to him but he did not reply. Rabbi Zeira said to him: “You were created by one of the members of the group, one of the Sages. Return to your dust.”
The golem, the robot, then was able to be destroyed - for despite its facsimile similarity to a human - that divine spark, blown into the nostrils of Adam, was not there.
The robotic body, devoid of any soul, is but a shell—what Maimonides calls in his magnum opus the Mishneh Torah “matter,” or in Hebrew a golem.
While a robot could never be Jewish, there is a Jewish lesson.
In 1975, the Lubavitcher Rebbe taught that just as a computer can apply its processing power to untold uses by applying its source code to whatever new case may arise - by using spiritual machine learning to accomplish something startlingly new ] we Jews have the ability to adapt to changes in the world—robotic or otherwise—by looking to our source code: the Torah.
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