Event: Jews

What is the proper spiritual posture from which to ask questions of a machine? Might formulating clever LLM prompts condition how we ask questions about, and put questions to, God? Are Jews—rigorously trained in iterative and dialectical reflections—uniquely prepared to adapt to the rise of AI? Can reading the Talmud teach us to be better programmers of the human soul? Or will the advent of AGI end human creativity? Is anticipation for the imminence of AGI similar to our longing for the Messiah? A few weeks ago, a hundred or so young Jewish professionals, Yale alumni, and tech futurists gathered in the palatial Tribeca loft of former Worldcoin CEO and tech thinker Max Novendstern to seek answers to these and similarly improbable questions. The event, “AI and Jewish Mysticism,” was organized by Rachel Bitutsky, an alumna of Shabtai, the Yale-affiliated Jewish leadership society, and Shabtai’s Rabbi Shmully Hecht. The atmosphere was gracious and collegial, and the dialogue refreshingly outlandish. Novendstern moderated a conversation between Stephen Kosslyn, the eminent Harvard University psychologist, and the Orthodox futurist rabbi Asher Crispe. The Jewish tradition of parsing religious texts, the panelists held, is similar to the architecture of learning machines trained to consume and synthesize seemingly infinite libraries of text. With a wry smile, Novendstern informed us early in the evening that he believes “actually existing AGI has a lot to do with the Jews!” Kosslyn spoke in the manner of a skilled educator, proffering insights into the neurological and psychiatric implications of AI. He compared its usage to the grafting of a prosthetic onto the body. The structures of human perception, he argued, were already built into the architecture of AI; thus AI should eventually be able to do everything that human beings can. He concluded with a pragmatic argument that the Torah…