Sometimes a great gift is unbearable. Artificial Intelligence is such a gift. My holocaust survivor grandparents also left me such a gift.
It’s called Judaism.
A meaningful, if ancient, religion with a deep wisdom that demands accountability.
I’ve spent my life trying to understand why and how my grandparents remained committed to orthodox Judaism despite unimaginable torture, persecution and antisemitism.
This sort of thinking is best framed in much the same way we design algorithms and the assumptions at their roots.
The arc of a man’s life is also rooted in premises. They fashion the stories he first tells himself and then, what he tells others…
And AI, with those deep neural networks, with their logical if/then, regressive iteration are modeled after the human mind after all.
That we have arrived at a moment when men believe machines have achieved sentience means it is an urgent matter to consider how we arrived at that conclusion.
To consider human handiwork capable of creating “Man,” even if it is only a mind, begs us to answer the questions we’ve unleashed:
Questions like what is sentience? Is that the defining feature of a man? What is the difference between mind and body? Is the difference biological? Is it metaphysical?
As machine output becomes indistinguishable from human output, we begin asking ourselves, yet again, what makes us human? More importantly, why it matters.
On a particularly bitter Canadian winter day, I buried my gloveless hand into the safety of my grandfather’s warm palm. We were walking home from synagogue and the memory of how he, without shoes or food, survived the Dachau Death March was triggered.
He tightened the grip of my 9-year-old small fingers in his paw-like calloused hand. The same hand that had the blue numbers A6295 tattooed on the forearm.
“I want to tell you something. It’s important you remember. And when you grow up, I want you to tell your children this story.”
Now, as a mother, I’ve had to explain to my children why Judaism is a worthy missive despite the heavy burden of commitment and the price of often being hated.
Why, despite the long history of persecution, we Jews have endured, and why we continue to endure.
It’s what drove me to write and study poetry:
The attempt to capture, apprehend… to distill unwieldy ideas.
A poetry of witness to trace the rhetorical and emotional picture of a shared human condition.
As a Jew, I have seen how science, lacking human charity or wisdom could unleash uncalibrated logic that can be terrifying.
If you don’t yet know, it was the scientific narrative of Eugenics that spurred and influenced the justification of genocide of Jews and other ethnic groups.
Eugenics in hind sight is shocking, and while we may even laugh now about the fact that we once thought the world was flat, those scientific principles captured the minds of many men. When it comes to algorithmic design that drives human relationships, it is high stakes for where we might be headed as a race.
What can start out as promising science can have horrifying effects and turn normal human beings into monsters.
We trust science, because it has taught us to be rigorous about our assumptions. It has taught us that instinct is fallible, and, that empirical evidence through our senses can be wrong. But logic and data can be flawed as well.
It has shown how one man (Hitler) can persuasively use science to create a narrative of destruction that inspires and brainwashes a mass of people into committing genocide.
And this is the point of what I’m trying to articulate.
AI is fashioned after human design and the unavoidable fact is we cannot program these systems if we ignore morality: Good vs. Evil. Life vs. Destruction. It’s the premise in the foundation of our relationships.
This is the specter we face.
In artificial intelligence and machine learning, we have created a digitized catalogue of human interests, a hive-like human mind that is being designed to become autonomous and mimic humanity in a sentient-like manner.
We assuage our concerns of the potential to be hurt by AI by saying that AI will always need human interaction and guidance.
That, it is a tool that with human direction and wisdom (and this is what drives Elon Musk’s pitch to merge with AI) can be a productive force for human advancement.
So, we argue, AI is rooted in the collection of data, scientific discovery and human opinion in order to better our existence.
But here’s where it gets strange:
In trying to simulate the human mind, we have created something in the image of ourselves, but with monstrous capabilities and super-human speed.
If there is a symbiotic relationship that fuels the advancement of machine learning, one must ask who is teaching whom? In the context of seeking wisdom from an aggregate mind, aren’t we then just teaching our aggregate selves?
It reminds one of the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel and the human desire to conquer its own vulnerability.
But what the builders of Babel were perturbed by is precisely what makes us uniquely human.
If AI is a massive reflection of ourselves and our accumulated knowledge, what are we hoping to learn? Or better, what are we hoping to teach?
At the time I am writing this most systems are siloed and created for specific tasks to improve human productivity (i.e. creative art, automating menial tasks) or alleviate human suffering (i.e. healthcare, research). Here there is an abundant mindset.
But there is also the fear of “black box” calculations (in GANs) that we cannot understand and which reveal destructive biases.
At the core of ML and AI advancements, and what propels us as a community, is that we continue to be fascinated by our human suffering, our sentience, and the meaningfulness of our existence. It is testament to our most human creative faculties, but also our inherent moral design.
If AI is an aggregate human student, and our student is our aggregate selves, there is certainly a disruption in the ways which we’ve been interpreting, in a collective, societal way, our understanding of our living purpose. On a fundamental level, it’s upending how we relate to ourselves and each other at the very least.
Like the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Information certainly qualifies as an extreme human event.
Our human innovation is, and always has been, driven by a narrative of transformation.
The philosopher James Allen famously quipped:
“Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.”
The questions we will ask and where they lead us are a gift.
Where and when logic falls apart, is where we find ourselves, fallible, bare, and most human.
The prospect of logic and sentience now being indistinguishable between human and machine means that we will discover anew, the narrative of what it means to be human.
Perhaps we are on a precipice now- where the Age of Information is evolving. We’re drowning in data. The question of what it all means still puzzles us. We will need wisdom at the helm if we are not to self-destruct.
It would seem the next frontier is the Age of Wisdom. And for that, I offer that we all examine morality and our wisdom traditions more closely.
I personally will rely on the deepest, most ancient, most profound wisdom that has guided my people. I will rely on God, His promises, and the moral guidance of the Ten Commandments. I believe the reason we are still here and stood the test of time, despite all odds, is because you can’t kill the truth of a good idea. And a good idea is one that celebrates and affirms life and unity, and that is always worth considering.
