"Irreplaceable" Rosh Hashanah Sermon on AI and the Human Soul
What does AI and the human soul have to do with each other? Below, Rabbi Holtz reflects on exactly that in his Rosh Hashanah sermon 'Irreplaceable.'
How much would you pay for a robot that took care of all your household chores for you? Or at least the repetitive ones. The cooking and the cleaning. I mean, with Amazon delivery or instacart or whatever, you could have food delivered to your house, have the robot unpack it. You could come home every night to a gourmet meal, without ever having to go to the store, turn on an oven, or anything. And then, no dishes! And no vacuuming, no mopping, none of that. Of course, your bed would be made for you with clean sheets. You’ll wake up the next morning to perfectly brewed coffee and whatever it is you ordered the night before. I have to admit, that does sound nice, right? So a thousand dollars? Five thousand? Ten thousand? What if it also did yard work? And laundry. But what about when the robot starts getting the kids off the school bus? Or wakes them in the morning, puts them on the self-driving automated school bus, takes them to a school with a curriculum and lesson plans developed by AI, then gets them off the bus, makes them dinner, and puts them to bed? If it’s starting to feel a little off at that point - I get it. If we can make life easier, that’s great. But if it makes a life less of a life…then there’s real hesitation.
Right now I think people have a lot of mixed emotions about AI. Like I said, anything that can make life better or easier, that’s great. But what’s the full picture? How will it affect our careers? Our quality of life? In a few years time, will anyone be employable? And not just the mundane tasks at work that we do, will we also out source the labor that gives our lives meaning?
To add a little more angst to the mix, in the last week Jacob Coxon, a 27 year old researcher who worked at both OpenAI, who made ChatGPT and Anthropic, who made Claude, resigned and tweeted, in what seems to be a whistleblower moment that people who work for these companies regularly talk about the possibility that AI could kill everyone. Rather than calm our fears, though, Evan Hubinger, the alignment science lead at Anthropic said it was around 10% chance in the next decade. I mean, that seems high, right? What were the odds of a nuclear armageddon at the height of the cold war? Now, honestly, I know nothing about this. I studied philosophy in school, not computer science. And it’s hard for me to imagine. But, I was a child of the 80s and 90s. I grew up on Terminator. But I also grew up with Star Trek and Data, and he seemed fine. And I suppose we’re all trying to figure out which movie or TV show are we living in - The Matrix or the Jetsons?
I doubt I’m alone in feeling that the big tech firms out of Silicon Valley have a bit of a mixed track record. On the one hand, social media is widely popular. On the other hand, a lot of people wish they lived in a world without it. And without smart phones. Flip phones are fine. Good to stay in touch. I’m saying this while we’re streaming our services to YouTube, because we genuinely want our synagogue accessible to people who can’t physically be here.
The ambivalence about technology reveals another truth too, that it’s at best a tool, and tools may be used for good or bad. What could be life saving medicine used one way could be poison used another. The choices that people make in how and when to use them matter a great deal.
A few months ago, there was an article about how AI solved a math problem called the Erdos unit conjecture that had stumped human mathematicians since 1946. The problem is, “given n points on a flat plane, what's the maximum number of pairs that can be exactly one unit apart?” No one could prove anything, but mathematicians figured it was a grid. Before I lose y'all to an advanced math problem, I’ll just say this. AI was able to do it, and it was then verified and refined by a team of people. For a human to have figured it out, it could have taken a lifetime of trying different variations with no guarantee of success. If that sort of problem-solving in math could be matched by problem-solving in healthcare, wouldn’t that be great? What sort of advancements in diagnoses, treatments, and cures would it help achieve? I don’t really want to write a sermon that will paint me as a Luddite, opposed to any automation. Technological advancements are what lets us enjoy a world where we can afford more than a change of clothes or two, where food is relatively plentiful, even if trips to the grocery store are getting ever more ridiculously expensive, and so on.
Yet, we also want to feel like our skills and talents are contributing to the functioning of the world in a way that matters. That when a client or patient or congregant comes to us, there’s something meaningful that we can offer. Aristotle wrote about this too in Nicomachean Ethics. He talked about the pride a benefactor takes in those they’ve helped, or that a craftsman takes in doing their craft. He said that poets, in particular, have an excessive love for their own poems. Makes you wonder a bit about ancient Greek poets? Maybe that was a call out to Homer. To be fair to Homer, one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters was the Odyssey. Not bad for a work that is thousands of years old. But the things we do, and the things we make, also contribute to our own sense of self. There are many things that machines have long been able to do better than humans. The first time a computer beat a world chess champion was in 1997 against Garry Kasparov. The best players in the world don’t stand a chance against a computer. Yet people still play and strive to improve. Ever wonder why modern art got so weird? It’s the camera. For centuries, artists tried to learn how to portray things more realistically. Along comes the camera and it can faithfully capture a moment in an instant. And so art evolved, but it didn’t go away. And the camera became a tool for an artist as well.
Technology is often widely adopted because it makes something easier. Very few things are as exciting as making something hard, easier. But we don’t always want it easy. I met a man the other day, he must have been around 80 years old, and let me tell you, he was impressive. He was telling me about a route he was planning on his bicycle, Six Gap up in north Georgia, from around Dahlonega, Suches, and Helen. I've done that ride a few times on my motorcycle, I can't imagine it on a bicycle. The ride he has planned is 104 miles with a total elevation gain of over 11,000 feet, going through six steep mountain passes. He said that he wasn't looking forward to it. So I asked why are you doing it then? He responded that he doesn't want to do it, he wants to have done it. Past tense. A lot of challenging things are like that. We don't want to do it, we may not even love it while we're doing it, but we're proud that we did it. All the practice we put into sports, or music, or preparing to become a bar or bat mitzvah. I know a few Eagle Scouts who put a lot of hard work into becoming an Eagle Scout. And they didn’t always enjoy it, but they were definitely proud afterwards.
I personally feel the most uneasy about technology that is so good at mimicking human speech that some people can’t even tell the difference. Human connection is amongst the richest, most worthwhile parts of human existence. Loving and being loved in return. Paying attention to someone, or having someone pay attention to you. When AI tells you it's listening, it’s not really listening in any way we previously understood the term. It’s a prompt from a computer program, not one soul ready to receive the outpouring of another.
With the disclaimer that we don’t take the story about the Creation of the world literally in a historical sense, today is the birthday of the world. More specifically, the Torah says that the world was created in six days before God rested on the seventh. Rosh Hashanah marks the sixth and final day of creation before Shabbat. The sixth day of Creation is the day that humanity was created, in other words, Happy 5,787th birthday to Adam and Eve. There’s a beautiful teaching in a rabbinic text from almost 2,000 years ago. It asks, “Why did God create humanity through Adam alone? To teach that whoever takes a life, it is as though they have destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is as though they have saved an entire world.” And it continues, when a human king mints a coin, they are exactly alike. Not so when God mints a new human being. They are all in the image of Adam, but they are all unique. We are all unique. Each of us is something and has something to offer that no one or no other thing can. When I want to spend time with my wife or my kids or my mom (she’s here today) or my friends I don’t want just any human being, and I don’t want a computer. I want those specific people. And I hope others feel that way about me. We can mean more to each other than a computer ever could because we can offer our unique souls and in return we can encounter other unique souls that mean something special to us. And when we lose someone, we lose something irreplaceable. My dad died in February 2019. All the time things come up that I wish I could talk to him or share something with him. I could share those same things with others, but it’s not the same. It’s certainly not the same with a computer.
Technology advances, and the world progresses. Or at least changes. But Rosh Hashanah is a reminder not just of a changing world, but of the uniqueness, the specialness of humanity as well. May we bring our full humanity with us into the year ahead, and may we appreciate and treasure the humanity in others as well. Shanah Tovah.
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