{"id":65508,"date":"2023-03-09T06:00:12","date_gmt":"2023-03-09T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=65508"},"modified":"2023-03-04T17:32:44","modified_gmt":"2023-03-04T22:32:44","slug":"artificial-intelligence-the-golem-the-genie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2023\/03\/artificial-intelligence-the-golem-the-genie\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial Intelligence, the Golem, & the Genie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The development of artificial intelligence is filling many people with alarm.\u00a0 Applications such as ChatGPT<\/a>\u2013which can generate scarily-believable imitations of everything from school writing assignments to sermons\u2013make our digital devices seem human<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This, in turn, is provoking all kinds of debate about what this means and what to do about it.\u00a0 What is the difference between an artificially-intelligent machine and a person?\u00a0 Might we develop robots some day that are, in effect, a different kind of sentient being?\u00a0 What are the ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence?<\/p>\n

\n

Are there theological issues?\u00a0 Would a rational robot have a soul and be in need of conversion?\u00a0 Would it be unfallen?\u00a0 Or is the whole concept a dangerous delusion?<\/p>\n

As I have posted before, drawing on the work of someone who is an expert on both the human mind and computers, the brain is not a computer<\/a>.\u00a0 We use language drawn from the workings of the mind\u2013such as \u201cmemory,\u201d \u201clanguage,\u201d \u201cinformation,\u201d and \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d\u2013to describe computer functions, but these are metaphors<\/em>.\u00a0 We won\u2019t be able to download our minds into the internet so we can live forever, nor will computers ever become so advanced that they will attain consciousness.\u00a0 Let alone take over the world, eliminate us as parasites, or become an all-powerful, all-knowing god.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what most people are afraid of about artificial intelligence, but issues do remain.\u00a0 Deborah Netburn has written an article entitled Can religion save us from Artificial Intelligence?<\/a> that points out that religious traditions have already<\/em>, as of long ago, dealt with the implications of non-human intelligences.<\/p>\n

She discusses the legend from Jewish folklore of the golem<\/em><\/a>, a man-made monster, whose name is the source of Tolkien\u2019s character and whose character is the basis of Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/em>.\u00a0 In the stories, Golems were fashioned from mud and became animate when the Divine Name written on a piece of paper was put into its mouth or head.\u00a0 Later rabbis surely knew the story of the golem<\/em> was legendary, but they speculated about what it would mean.\u00a0 Netburn writes,<\/p>\n

\n

Since the earliest days of AI research in the 1950s, the desire to create a human-like intelligence has been compared to the legend of the golem, a mythical creature from Jewish folklore, created by powerful rabbis from mud and magic to do its master\u2019s bidding. The most famous golem is the one allegedly made by the 16th century Rabbi Judah Low ben Bezulel of Prague to protect the Jewish people from antisemitic attacks. The golem also served as an inspiration for Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein.<\/p>\n

For centuries, the idea of an animate creature made by man and lacking a divine spark or a soul, has been part of the Jewish imagination. Rabbis have argued over whether a golem can be considered a person, if it could be counted in a minyan, (the quorum of 10 men required for traditional Jewish public prayer), if it could be killed, and how it should be treated.<\/p>\n

From these rabbinic discussions, an ethical stance on artificial intelligence emerged long before computers were invented, said\u00a0Nachson Goltz<\/a>, a law professor at Edith Cowan University in Australia, who has written about the\u00a0Jewish perspective on AI<\/a>. While it is considered permissible to create artificial entities to assist us in our tasks, \u201cwe must remember our responsibility to keep control over them, and not the other way around,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Rabbi Eliezer Simcha Weiss, a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council of Israel, echoed this idea in a recent speech. \u201cIn every story of the golem, the golem is finally destroyed or dismantled,\u201d he said. \u201cIn other words, the lesson the rabbis are teaching is that anything man makes has to be controlled by man.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Another ancient legend that seems applicable to our seemingly magical technology that does our bidding, but which threatens to destroy us, is that of the djinn<\/a>.\u00a0 That is to say, the genie<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

Another cautionary tale from Jewish and Muslim folklore revolves around the djinn, a nonhuman entity made of smokeless fire, that can occasionally be bound by humans and chained to their will. This is the origin of the story of the genie who can grant us anything we want, but cannot be put back in the bottle.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe stories of the genie are an example of what happens when you ask a nonhuman to grant human wishes,\u201d said\u00a0Damien Williams<\/a>, a professor of philosophy and data science at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. \u201cWhat comes out the other side seems shocking and punitive, but if you actually trace it back, they are simply granting those desires to the fullest extent of their logical implications.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So what do we learn from these ancient tales about today\u2019s artificial intelligence?\u00a0 Our technology is just an extension of ourselves.\u00a0 It exists to fulfill our desires.\u00a0 It can turn against us and harm us.\u00a0 It must be controlled.<\/p>\n

Can we just get rid of it?\u00a0 Well, unfortunately, we can\u2019t put the genie back into the bottle.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>

Photo:\u00a0 Reproduction of the Prague Golem by user Thander \u2013 http:\/\/pt.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ficheiro:Golem.JPG, Public Domain, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=8873104<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The development of artificial intelligence is filling many people with alarm, raising a host of questions. And yet this new technology has already been the subject of reflection from ancient religions. As in the legend of the non-human intelligence known as the golem. And in the legend of the genie, who fulfills our desires but in a dangerous way and cannot be put back into the bottle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":65559,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,28,39,44],"tags":[218,13143,13140,13137,4346,1211,5653],"class_list":["post-65508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-islam","category-literature","category-religions","category-technology","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-djinn","tag-genies","tag-golem","tag-islam","tag-judaism","tag-religion-and-technology"],"yoast_head":"\nArtificial Intelligence, the Golem, & the Genie<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The development of artificial intelligence is filling many people with alarm, raising a host of questions. 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