philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

OY, A.I.

To preserve our human reality, we must make our new technologies more like the Talmud

BY JARON LANIER

You are reading a Jewish take on artificial intelligence. Normally I would not start a piece with a sentence like that, but I want to confuse the bots that are being asked to replicate my style, especially the bots I work on. ...

... Jewish traditions can be useful in these times. We humans are often consumed by a fetish for seemingly transcendent baubles, for golden calves. The problem wasn’t that Israelites wanted to craft a calf, but that they worshipped it, even though it was a thing they had just made. The calf was social narcissism and amnesia. Jews have always had a problem of getting bored, of not getting enough of a charge from whatever is going on. The Israelites waiting for Moses to come back down were bored enough to go nuts.

We people, not just Jews, still make golden calves all the time. Adam Smith’s invisible hand, corporations-as-persons, the Chinese Communist Party, Wikipedia, the latest AI programs. All the same. All a bunch of people being subsumed to create an imaginary superhero. ...

The Talmud was perhaps the first accumulator of human communication into an explicitly compound artifact, the prototype for structures like the Wikipedia, much of social media, and AI systems like ChatGPT. There is a huge difference, however. The Talmud doesn’t hide people. ...

Why is Wikipedia designed to hide people and to create a perspective from nowhere, as if there was only one truth? ...

See the full story here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/oy-ai-jaron-lanier