AI. Rarely have two letters seemed to hold so much promise, or so much peril. Artificial intelligence, we are told, could cure humanity’s ills. Or it could end us entirely. Is one or the other true? Could elements of both be accurate at once?
This week, we are running the first in a series of articles exploring AI and the areas where it intersects with Jews and Judaism. In many ways, this is a quintessentially J. story: The beating heart of AI tech, after all, sits in our backyard here in the Bay Area, and a significant number of Jews are involved in creating, legislating and thinking about the consequential technology. What’s more, among Judaism’s motivating principles, tikkun olam, repairing the world, ranks high. So does pikuach nefesh, saving lives. Asking important questions — and debating the answers — are also among our traits as a people. We hope this series will spark conversations in our community and beyond about the place of AI in society, and about the places where we, as Jews, can contribute.
Unlike our cover, which was designed by AI, this series is written by a real human being, journalist Dan Friedman. In the opinion section, David Zvi Kalman writes about how Jews might approach AI. And culture editor Maya Mirsky digs back into J.’s archives where, in the early 1920s, the paper reviewed a Czech play, performed in San Francisco, about machine-made men, “a new and fascinating topic,” Maya writes, “that today might be called artificial intelligence.”
But back then it seemed like science fiction. Today, it’s real life.