AI and Human Beings

Sermon Shabbat Naso 5786, Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

You may have seen in the news that the newish American Pope Leo issued a long encyclical this week called, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which translates roughly to “Magnificent Humanity.”  The issuing of a papal encyclical is a big deal, particularly for Catholics, of course, but often for all religious types, and even for those who aren’t so religious, and they can change public discussion on an issue, not just church policy. 

Papal encyclicals are issued whenever the current Pope chooses to do so, so there isn’t really a set pattern to them.  Sometimes they represent a significant change in the direction of the entire Catholic Church, a huge organization with a hierarchical structure and which still has significant influence in the world, even if it is not what it once was.  While papal encyclicals can be a kind of rebottled piety, or reaffirm conservative positions on contemporary issues, they can also jump the line and change things in the world.

Perhaps most famously Pope John XXIII organized the Vatican II Council and his successor, Pope Paul VI, formally issued the encyclical Nostra Aetate, which transformed the Catholic Church’s relationship with non-Christians, and formally rejected the charge of deicide and all antisemitism after nearly two millennia of its tacit acceptance by the Church.  It created a huge sea change in official church policy, and while it took time to fully impact the large Roman Catholic world, it surely transformed the way that many Catholics saw Jews and Judaism, and built positive relationships that have endured.  So sometimes these things turn out to be incredibly important.  This is the very first encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIV, famously a White Sox fan from Chicago and the first pope ever from the United States. 

The subject of this encyclical is not just how remarkable and extraordinary human beings are, but how and why artificial intelligence is a challenge to our very humanity.  This encyclical is over 40,000 words long—basically, more than half as long as the average book published these days—so my comments on it tonight will be limited by the fact that I have only mostly scanned it and read reviews of it.  And of course, used Artificial Intelligence to analyze it for me…

In some ways, my first impression of it is that coming from the pope of the Roman Catholic Church is reads, in part, shockingly like a Renaissance humanist text.  The focus of this document, generally speaking, is to elevate the extraordinary beauty, talent, goodness, and even fallibility of our shared humanity.  While it certainly views human beings as creations of God, and reflections of the divine image and spirit, it is filled with the kinds of statements about the rich and vibrant qualities that human beings possess, of how amazing and beautiful we are, how our talents and choices and intelligence are unique, special, even sacred, how we are the earthly reflections of God’s grandeur.  In this way, the Pope’s words remind me of that lovely Shakespearean soliloquy from Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man!

how noble in reason!

how infinite in faculty!

in form and moving how

express and admirable!

in action how like an angel!

in apprehension how like a god!

the beauty of the world!

the paragon of animals!

Of course, Hamlet, being Hamlet, immediately shifts back to noting that we are really just, “the quintessence of dust.”  He is a depressing sort of character, really… but what a beautiful statement of the highest qualities that human beings can reflect.

Now, from the leader of a religion that is profoundly focused on the afterlife and redemption from sin, this is spicy stuff, a quotidian focus on the mortal dressed up in the fanciest robes of the church.  It is much closer to the heady humanism of Erasmus than it is to the more typically pious preaching we might expect from the Catholic Church’s vicar on earth.

After stating the wonders of humanity, the real focus of this long encyclical is on the problem posed by the rapidly increasing use of artificial intelligence in so many aspects of life.  The Pope notes that this is typically done in the name of greater efficiency, even at the cost of true human creativity, of jobs, or the unpredictable and often inspiring randomness of actual people doing their own work.  We are at the forefront, the beginning, the appetizer stage of the use of artificial intelligence these days, and Pope Leo is worried that we will all simply fall into the obvious trap that this still-developing technology offers us. 

Citing the Bible, in this case our Tanakh, the Pope then compares artificial intelligence to the Tower of Babel, a towering city built on pride and, to the pope, dictatorial direction.  It ends badly, of course.  In contrast, he writes about the way that Nehemia worked to rebuild Jerusalem after the return from Babylonian Exile: gathering the people together, creating a communal, shared response, respecting the whole people, sharing responsibility with everyone.  Obviously, for Pope Leo, that is the best, most appropriate way for human beings to use their own intelligence to make a better, holier world.

As he says, “Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice. In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.”

Now, a word about the history of artificial intelligence is called for here.  Computer scientists worked incredibly hard on the “problem of artificial intelligence” for something like 60 years without making much discernible progress.  They started back in the early 1950s, and for a long time the only “AI” machines were rather, well, stupid devices that couldn’t understand your verbal prompts or do, well, much of anything; ultimately the best of them finally could play chess well.  Um, ok.  The AI industry constantly promised that computers would soon be able to think like humans, and just as constantly failed to deliver.  For a long time that was because it takes a huge amount of computing power to create anything like the human brain, and until fairly recently computers just weren’t fast enough with enough memory to do it.  But there were many other problems, and over a period of time that saw so many fabulous technological developments, right up to our ridiculously capable cellphones of today, Artificial Intelligence was the impossible Holy Grail of computer science. 

For some of us, our dark images of Artificial Intelligence and its potential dangers were shaped by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the semi-evil computer Hal, kills most of the astronauts to protect itself.  It was not a positive presentation of artificial intelligence.

Behind the scenes, slow progress suddenly produced a series of breakthroughs, which mostly involved the way that machines learn.  Finally, in 2020—less than six years ago—Open AI released the first version of what rapidly triggered a revolution.  And it is that revolution that the Pope is taking aim at.

And he has a point.  You may have noticed that you did not know the name of the Drash writer, the darshan of the piece that was read earlier on the Torah portion of Naso.  Ploni Almoni is the way the Talmud says, “John Doe”, or maybe we say “John Doe” in place of the much older “Ploni Almoni.”  That Drash was written by an artificial intelligence platform, Claude AI, that I have found useful for research.  I think you will agree with me that it’s an excellent Drash, and it was generated in about 30 seconds by Claude.  I’m afraid that my job security as a rabbi is being challenged right now; hopefully, there aren’t too many board members present tonight who will agree that it’s better than my sermons…

You may remember that a couple of years ago, back in the fall of 2023, a Reform rabbi, Rabbi Josh Fixler of a Houston congregation trained AI to write in his own style and produce a voice that sounded like his own delivering a sermon, and had it, well, temporarily fool his congregation.  It caused a stir, and of course the ultimate message was that artificial intelligence cannot replace the empathy and human skills of an actual rabbi…  But it sure can do the pesky research that used to take so many hours to do, can’t it?

A couple of thoughts about Artificial Intelligence then.  First, I personally believe that, like any new technology, it is a new tool with great potential.  All new technologies create disruption, and require adaptation periods, and AI is no different here.  All new technologies benefit some people financially, and hurt others.  There is really no way around this.  Raging against new tech is, well, mostly silly.  I recall one of the first congregations I served as cantor when I was still a teenager, and a kind of sermon one of the lay people gave one Shabbat saying, “They are starting to build cars with robots.  After all the auto workers lose their jobs, which robots are going to buy the cars the other robots are building?” 

As to human creativity: well, I may have even more faith in the human being than the Pope does.  There are painful tasks that we currently have to do that AI can do better and faster, and that’s all to the good. And there will always be things we can do that AI doesn’t do, things that are uniquely human. 

Machines, for all the ways they are being made to simulate human beings, do not feel.  They do not care.  They do not have actual empathy.  They do not build true community.  They do not pray.  They do not love.

But we do.  It is our profoundly human gift, given by God, that in our emotional, inspirational messiness we have the great capacity to care, and love, and, yes, hate, and bring meaning to our limited lives.

And those gifts are something we cannot bestow on a machine, no matter how sophisticated it becomes.

So, use AI where it is useful.  But don’t get too captivated by your devices and your tools. Because what really matters is that remarkable spark of the divine that you carry inside you, that profound, ineffable, innate humanity.