This past summer, a group of prominent haredi rabbis issued a ban on the use of artificial-intelligence chatbots. Jacob J. Schacter sympathizes with the rabbis’ concerns about the dangers of these programs, but disputes the alarmist position (shared by many outside the haredi world) that AI will “transform human life beyond recognition.” He urges instead a more sober approach:
It is how technology is used that matters. History would suggest that rather than resist steel because it can be beaten into swords, we do better to embrace it and make plowshares instead—not least because we as a species have never proven able to choose not to create something that has been in our power to create.
To Schacter a helpful historical precedent is the printing press, to which eminent rabbis likewise responded with alarm:
Despite all this, of course, printing flourished. This was in part because many in the Jewish community recognized how useful it was. Of Gutenberg’s invention of printing, Rabbi David Ganz (1541–1613) wrote in the entry for the year 1440 in his historical Tsemah David that “nothing as valuable as it is found in all the wisdoms and clever devices from the day that God created man on the earth,” and that, “were it not for printing, God forbid, Torah would have been forgotten from Israel.”
Rather than seek to throttle the exposure of the Jewish community to AI, which will surely prove futile outside the haredi community and perhaps ultimately inside it, too, communities need to think hard about how to maximize its advantages and minimize its threats. These are choices.
Read more on Sapir: https://sapirjournal.org/technology/2023/12/jewish-technophobia-an-old-story/