Jews Aren’t Loud Enough about AI

I read Moshe Koppel’s recent essay on AI and Jewish thought with great interest. Koppel eloquently describes how Judaism’s solutions for the problems presented by AI will emerge and sets forth a theory about why this old religion is up to the task of navigating a world in the middle of a technological revolution. What I wish to do here is provide two critiques: one methodological, the other substantive.

The first is not specific to Koppel’s essay but applies to much that has been written on the subject. Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Jewish writing about artificial intelligence has been replete with initial reactions, but there has been little evidence that writers on the topic are engaging in constructive dialogue, let alone reading one another. This would be fine if the Jewish AI discourse was new, but it is almost as old as AI itself. Norman Lamm, a leading American rabbi, and Azriel Rosenfeld, an ordained rabbi and pioneering computer scientist, were writing about artificial life in the 1960s. Even leaving aside discussions of the golem—whose usefulness as an AI stand-in is debatable—by my count at least a dozen articles about Judaism and AI have been published in academic or halakhic journals since that time, not to mention many online articles and responsa. Collectively, this research has already uncovered many primary texts that may prove to be touchstones in the development of a “Jewish perspective” on AI. We’ve made significant progress, at least on paper.

But progress is worthless if it is ignored. Open questions, even great ones, do not make a field of study if nobody is attempting to answer them. Koppel champions Judaism’s tradition of dissent and refinement as a key to the Jewish response, but I have seen article after well-meaning article on the subject fail to elicit responses from rabbis, scholars, community leaders, or Jewish intellectuals. In this age of technological wonders, why do we insist on reinventing the wheel?