I’ve been following the stories about AI’s existential risk and the chance of it destroying humanity. And yes, it has increased my concern about it.
But I also know that these kinds of conversations are not new. They didn’t start a few weeks ago: over the last few years, if not more, AI has been either heralded as a utopian dreamworld or a nightmarish hellscape. Either AI will eradicate all disease, and we will all share in a munificent bounty or all humans will be wiped out from the earth. In either scenario, we see a vision of the end-times. However, this isn’t the first time society has been promised a new technology that may either destroy us or save us. From the printing press to radio and television to nuclear technology to the internet and social media, each invention was said to herald a new era that will “change everything.” Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s not.
While I think it’s clear that wide deployment and adoption of AI will make significant changes to our society and our daily lives over the next few years and decades, I’m still grappling with whether it’s a difference of degree or of kind. So many promised new technologies fall flat (such as virtual reality), and it can be very hard to separate out hype from reality, both for its promise and its dangers.
That is why I’ve recently been thinking about this text from Avot deRabbi Natan: “If you are holding a young plant in your hands and someone says to you, ‘Look – the Messiah has arrived!’, first finish planting the plant, and only afterward go out to greet them.” While this text now tends to be used to emphasize ideas surrounding environmental justice, it’s also a reminder that utopian (or apocalyptic!) visions are often announced, but rarely come to fruition. Approach these proclamations with a heavy dose of skepticism, and even if they do come true, planting a tree will still be laying the groundwork for future generations.
Interestingly, what follows in the Avot deRabbi Natan text continues to downplay potential excitement with another extreme example: “If children tell you, ‘Come, let’s build the Temple,’ do not listen to them. But if elders tell you, ‘Come, let’s dismantle the Temple,’ listen to them. Why? Because what children build often leads to destruction, and what elders dismantle can be true rebuilding.” This isn’t as much about age as it is maturity and wisdom: Not everything that is built is a net positive, and it takes time for us to recognize the impact of our inventions.
And this is where the day-to-day and mundane tasks can have tremendous power. We are about to conclude the holiday of Sukkot and enter into Shemini Atzeret, which originally celebrated the end of the harvest season. In ancient Israel, Pesach and Shavuot were the times of year when we planted, and Sukkot was the holiday when we reaped the bounty. For one week during Sukkot, we live in a home that evokes fragility. Then, right after we build it, we dismantle it. Perhaps most important, like any mitzvah, we are the ones who build the sukkah and we are the ones who take it down. While we couldn’t control the wind or the rain or harvest, we could decide when to build and when to pause.
When we see predictions of doom, we sometimes feel at the mercy of forces greater than us. But a major reason we have avoided catastrophes like nuclear annihilation is due to human agency. Legislation and regulations are what allowed the public to feel comfortable with automobiles, or go to a supermarket to buy food, or wire their homes with electricity. It’s not sexy, or exciting, or headline-grabbing, but they are what allow us to feel like a new technology is actually safe and worth using.
In their excellent essay “Tikkun Olam, One Prompt at a Time,” Rabbanit Sara Wolkenfeld and Dr. Sam Arbesman remind us that we need to focus on the mundane and daily tasks, rather than envisioning a utopian (or dystopian) future:
Humans were not designed to live in constant anticipation of utopia or just-over-the-horizon perfection. If we believe that our future world will be a lot like the one we currently inhabit, but with new opportunities for significant improvements, we can embrace our present world as one that offers opportunities for experimentation and openings for human creativity enhanced by these developing technologies. That vision is a lot easier to absorb, and also gives us something concrete to work toward.
We need this approach to artificial intelligence: Even if it does not wipe out humanity, we want it to do more than just “not destroy us.” We want it to be helpful and valuable, both for us as individuals and as a society.
So while we do want to keep an eye on rogue AI agents, or cyber-attacks, or bio-weapons, it’s more crucial to recognize our own human agency and to direct AI in ways that benefit us. There will be many more predictions of imminent disaster and of a blissful new Eden. But Sukkot, and in particular its last few days, remind us that we have agency, as well: what we build, what we dismantle, and when. 3