Artificial Intelligence Could Revolutionize the Study of Jewish Law. Is That a Good Thing?

As early as the 1960s, scholars and technicians began the task of digitizing halakhic literature, making it possible to search quickly through an ever-growing group of texts. Technological advances since then have improved the quality of searches, sped up the pace of digitization, and made such tools accessible to anyone with smartphone. Now, write Moshe Koppel and Avi Shmidman, machine learning and artificial intelligence can do much more: they can make texts penetrable to the lay reader by adding vowel-markings and punctuation while spelling out abbreviations, create critical editions by comparing early editions and manuscripts, and even compose lists of sources on a single topic.