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Aron T's avatar

1. I knew Norman Lamm personally. He was the rabbi of JC when I was young. His daughter was a classmate, and I would go to Sunday study sessions with him when I was in 8th grade. Someone once asked him if he believed we would ever encounter alien intelligence through space travel. I heard him say with my own ears something that shocked me at the time: that if there is an alien intelligence out there, he would stop believing in the G-d of the Torah. So I don’t think he would be on board with AI poskim.

2. Your assumption that AI intelligence is the same as human intelligence is something our VC overlords want us to believe. From my professional and personal experience in the field, I strongly disagree. It’s not that I don’t think in some distant future machines might partake in consciousness (Rudi Rucker has some arguments that are thoughtful and somewhat convincing on this topic). But should that ever happen (probably not in my grandchildren’s grandchildren’s lifetime, but I am not a prophet), being disembodied, their experience will always be inhuman, which inherently disqualifies them from being a posek.

3. I understand your strong feelings regarding the lack of egalitarianism in Jewish communal life. But let’s face it, Halacha is inherently hierarchical, not because of human authority but because G-d is the ultimate authority. The problems in the Orthodox world are more related to the fact that they adopted the wrong parts of modernity, particularly the ultra-Orthodox. But that’s a long discussion on its own.

4. The problem with Halacha in the modern world is not the fact that it’s not egalitarian enough and certainly not that it’s not text-based enough, but the opposite: since Rambam’s Mishna Torah all the way to the Kitzur Shulkhan Aruch, it has moved away from being a messy human activity and becoming too text-based. Rabbinical ethics in Talmudic times was authentically human, using texts and hermeneutical exegesis to express deep philosophical and psychological insights. It is always the case that precisely when the texts begin to dominate and human feeling gets pushed aside, that antinomian trends push back on Halakha (the Hasidic movement being a prime example). Halakha is not about human intelligence but human emotion.

5. Halakha is also inherently a communal, behavioral phenomenon. Hazal themselves say when you want to know what Halakha is, go to the market.

6. 4 & 5 both imply that handing Halakha over to disembodied, non-human text-bots (no matter how intelligent) which can never participate in Jewish community and human emotional life, is a terrible idea, antithetical to the meaning of Halakha as a social, human institution.

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Ro's avatar

Thank you — I have a lot of tabs open now! The Chabad thought will be one of the most interesting. Hasidim are mystics that believe our souls are in a lower realm and that our job is to infuse that realm with spirituality. Seeing how some have already adopted technology, it will be fascinating to follow their logic.

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