Whither Humanity? Becoming More Human in an Artificial Age
Whither Humanity?Recently, I found myself going back and forth over email with someone who had asked me a halachic question. I answered, he pushed back, I clarified, and still we were not quite getting anywhere. So, I pasted the entire exchange into ChatGPT. What came back was unsettlingly familiar. It drew on arguments I had made elsewhere, reflected ideas I had written about before, and somehow sounded like me. I thought to myself, This is an answer that I could have written. If a machine can know what I know, reason the way I reason, and even write in my voice, what, pray tell, is left for me to do?!
For centuries, extraordinary knowledge and memory were considered the greatest achievements of the human mind. The Vilna Gaon, the great 18th-century Talmudic scholar, believed that a serious student of Torah should know at least one tractate by heart. One of his students proudly told him that he had mastered all of Masechet Sukkah. So the Gra tested him: How many disputes between Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehudah are there in the tractate? The student had no idea. The Gra proceeded to identify its debates, patterns, and connections, one after another. For generations, we heard a story like that and marveled at the extraordinary power of the human mind. Today, I could type all the Gra’s questions into a computer and have my answers in seconds!
The Talmud presents two different models of intellectual greatness. It describes two extraordinary scholars: Rav Yosef was known as Sinai, and Rabbah as Oker Harim, an uprooter of mountains. Sinai was the master of knowledge, with extraordinary breadth and command of the vast corpus of Torah. Oker Harim was the brilliant analyst, able to take a difficult problem apart, make connections, and develop new ideas.
The Gemara asks: סיני ועוקר הרים איזה מהם קודם? Which one takes precedence? It answers: סיני קודם, שהכל צריכין למרי חטיא: Sinai comes first, because ultimately everyone needs the information. Amazingly, after the invention of the printing press, some suggested that the equation had changed. Once information could easily be found in books, perhaps what mattered more was the Oker Harim, the person who knew what to do with it.
That was true about books, and even more so with electronic databases that are searchable. But AI is upending that distinction too. It can compare sources, identify patterns, construct arguments, suggest interpretations, even generate ideas that had never occurred to us. Artificial intelligence now challenges both Sinai and Oker Harim, both models of intellectual greatness. So what is left for us?
There’s more to it. Beyond just giving us useful tools, new technologies change the people who use them. A recent cover article in The Atlantic pointed out that the spread of reading as a common skill a few hundred years ago, for example, didn’t just make information more accessible; it changed how people thought and how they experienced the world. We are now living through another transformation of that magnitude. So AI raises a deeper question that goes beyond what machines can do or what I can do. We also have to ask: What kind of people will we be in this age of AI?
Our tradition has never viewed knowledge and intellectual ability as being in isolation from the rest of the human being. The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot lists forty-eight ways through which Torah is acquired. Knowledge and analysis are on the list, but listen to these: humility, reverence, closeness with teachers and friends, loving other people, bearing another person’s burden. What do they have in common? Most of the list has nothing to do with intellectual ability. Our sages understood that how we learn and what we are capable of understanding are inextricably linked with the kind of people we are.
The Talmud makes an even more remarkable statement about the disputes between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel. You know the one: אלו ואלו דברי אלהים חיים הן, “these and those are the words of the living God.” והלכה כבית הלל, but the halakhah follows Beit Hillel. The Gemara asks the obvious question: if both are divrei Elokim chayim, why do we follow Beit Hillel? The answer is amazing for what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say that Beit Hillel knew more Torah. It doesn’t say that their arguments were more sophisticated. It doesn’t say that they were greater Sinai or greater Oker Harim. The answer? מפני שנוחין ועלובין היו: because they were gentle and humble. They studied the opinions of Beit Shammai along with their own, and they would even teach Beit Shammai's position before teaching their own.
That’s an extraordinary statement. It’s not just that Beit Hillel were brilliant scholars and also good people. Far beyond that: the reason we follow their rulings is because of the kind of people they were. Their humility enabled them to listen, to understand the other side, and therefore to see the question more completely. Who we are is ultimately more important than what we know, because the kind of people we are shapes what we are capable of seeing, understanding, and doing with that knowledge.
That ancient Jewish vision of human greatness is even more urgently needed in an age of AI. If abilities we have traditionally admired, like knowledge, memory, analysis, can increasingly be replicated by a machine, then every one of us is forced to ask a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human?
The Torah’s answer begins on its very first page: Human beings were created betzelem Elokim, in the image of God. To live fully as a human being means to strive to actualize the tzelem Elokim within us. The question of the High Holy Days, then, is: What kind of human being am I, and what kind will I be this year? On these days, we stand before God and take seriously what it means to have been created in His image. And that idea has many dimensions. I want to focus on four of them. God is moral, God is relational, God is creative, and God is choosing. Each of those dimensions creates an obligation upon us to be more like God. And each of those dimensions of our humanity demands more attention in an age of AI.
God is moral; we are moral beings. We ask not only what can be done or what is profitable, convenient, or pleasurable, but what ought to be done, what is right, and what our choices will mean for the world or even just for another person. Animals may act out of instinct or even affection or loyalty, but human beings can step outside our immediate desires and ask: What is the right thing to do in a situation? We don’t always do it. Sometimes we choose the easier way out. But the very capacity to make our lives answer to a moral standard is part of what makes us human. In this age, we need to exercise our moral judgment more deliberately, not allow convenience to make our choices for us. The more machines can tell us what works, the more we need to ask what's right.
God is relational; we are relational beings. Our whole lives are about the relationships we have with our family, our friends, our colleagues, our community. Sometimes a relationship is expressed simply by being there for another person: visiting someone sitting shiva, or showing up to share in their simcha. And yet, increasingly, technology allows us to interact without really encountering another person. AI can write a job application, and a company's AI can evaluate it. It can write my email, and then write your response. AI removes friction from relationships, but real relationships have friction. Real people misunderstand us. They disagree with us. They don't always respond the way we want. Think about all the conversations we have even with people we love, maybe especially people we love. Real relationships mean encountering another person who is not us, whose needs may inconvenience us, whose opinions may challenge us. Hillel did not become Hillel by avoiding Shammai. His school’s greatness was that they learned to listen so carefully to the people with whom they disagreed. We need to become more capable of encountering other people, not less. More willing to listen, to disagree, to be challenged. In this age, the more technology removes friction from our lives, the more we need to choose real relationships, with all their friction and inconvenience.
God creates. We are creative beings. Rav Kook wrote that in every human creation, even the simplest one, מתגלים המון מחשבות ורגשות, הרבה יותר מהגלוי; there are thoughts and feelings revealed far beyond what appears explicitly. I think about a picture my daughter drew years ago of our family – it’s still scotch-taped to my office wall. I don’t love it because it is an especially accurate representation of what we all look like. I love it because somehow, in those lines on the page, I can see something of her, something of how she saw our family and her world at that moment. Maybe I can even see things that she never consciously intended to put there. Rav Kook says that every human creation is like that. When we write, paint, build, even when we have an ordinary conversation, we put something of ourselves into the world. The creation becomes a way for one human being to encounter another, to see something through another person’s eyes, to experience something of another person’s inner world. Artificial intelligence can produce beautiful prose. It can make an image, compose music, design a building, even write a sermon. But the value of human creativity lies not only in the product but in the human being expressed through it. In this age, we need to keep creating things that contain something of ourselves. The more a machine can produce, the more it matters that we make things nothing else could have made.
And finally, God chooses. We are choosing beings, capable of aspiring to become different. We have the remarkable capacity to look at ourselves and say: I don’t have to remain the person I am today. I can regret something I have done; I can repair a relationship I have damaged; I can aspire to be the kind of person I want to become and begin moving toward that goal. Teshuva means that we are not simply the sum of our programming. Sure, our habits can be powerful, our past choices shape us. But in the final analysis we can choose again. Nothing is more central to these High Holy Days than the insistence that the person I have been does not determine the person I can become. That is teshuvah, a uniquely human capacity. In an age with technology that will only get better at predicting who we are, we need to insist, louder than ever, that we are not finished becoming who we will be.
In a world in which artificial intelligence can know so much, analyze so much, and produce so much, we may wonder what will be left for us. But Judaism has never measured human greatness only by knowledge and intellect. Who we are matters more than what we know or what we can do. And so the question is not what AI will look like in five years or ten years. The more important question is what we will look like. Will we be more compassionate, more connected to one another, more creative, more capable of change? That is our charge in 5787: to cultivate those qualities that make us most fully human, and in doing so, to more fully actualize our own tzelem Elokim. As the world around us grows more artificial, our task grows only more essential: to become, deliberately and persistently, ever more fully human.
*The opening of this sermon was inspired by a recent essay by my friend, Rabbi Avraham Stav. I am also indebted to the writings and teaching of my teacher, Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, and to the work of Professor Aviezri Fraenkel, and grateful to Rabbis Josh Lookstein, Tzvi Sinensky, and Max Hollander for their comments and suggestions.
