\n Like all the best overnight sensations, artificial intelligence has quietly been toiling away in the background for years before everyone, seemingly at once, turned around, noticed it, and kicked it straight to the top of the proverbial charts \u2013 which in this case means making it the defining trend of the 2020s, bar none. And that\u2019s really saying something when you consider all the insanity that has happened in the world just these past six years.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n Artificial intelligence certainly isn\u2019t new and it has quietly been impacting our lives since the term was first coined way, way back in 1956 by computer scientist John McCarthy (thanks, Gemini!), but it would be disingenuous to suggest that it hasn\u2019t really stepped up its game over the past decade or so. The so-called \u201cdeep learning revolution\u201d in the late 2000s through mid-2010s, in particular, gave rise to what most of us think of when we think about AI: generative AI, which mimics human creativity, and highly advanced chatbots \u2013 or LLMs (large language models) \u2013 which mimic the complexities of human language.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n And heaven help us all.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n Or maybe not? As someone who not only writes for a living but frequently writes about the creative arts, my knee-jerk reaction to these particular trends is something in the vicinity of \u201ckill it, kill it quick, before it kills us!\u201d, but I may be being a bit rash. Artificial intelligence in its current (and still nascent) incarnation is, after all, an inordinately complicated subject and its potential uses range from curing cancer to, well, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n So, when I sat down for a WhatsApp call with Rav Mois Navon, an ordained Orthodox rabbi, engineer, and a leading expert in the ethics and philosophy of AI, I was all too aware that any serious discussion about AI \u2013 even just the areas in which he has particular expertise \u2013 would take days, not minutes; multiple academic tomes, not a couple of pages in a magazine. This was clear just from attending one of his thought-provoking shiurim when he visited our shores as Yeshiva Mizrachi\u2019s visiting \u201cscholar in residence\u201d this past Shavuot.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n But we have to start somewhere and my utterly fascinating conversation with Rav Navon was a very, very good place to start.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Bit of Background<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Rav Navon was born and raised in Los Angeles in a traditional but not particularly observant family. When trying to decide what to major in at university, the young Mois Navon was convinced to take up engineering by a family friend who worked in the field and who also promised him a job when he graduated, but as it turns out this friend wouldn\u2019t just influence his career path, but his spiritual path as well. As a religious Jew, he introduced Mois to engineering, but also to Orthodox Judaism. While the former utilised his skills in maths and science, the latter was the answer to those universal questions he had been asking himself since he was a kid: why are we, as human beings, here on this Earth?\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n \u201cLA is a fun place, so you can fill your mind with fun, and it sort of numbs the need for meaning,\u201d Rav Navon explains. \u201cBut at the end of the day, you want to know why you are here. And that\u2019s the task of religion. And this [family friend] said, there\u2019s a purpose. You\u2019re here to fix yourself. You\u2019re here to fix the world.\u201d\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Such an idea resonated deeply with him and along his spiritual journey he started going out with a girl from a similar background going through a similar journey. A few years later, when the couple were married with two young children, she suggested, \u201cyou know, if we want to do this Jewish thing, we need to go to the land of the Jews,\u201d so they did. He started off in Israel working for IBM and then moved on to different tech start-ups before ultimately ending up as one of the founding engineers at Mobileye, a company that would prove to be a major pioneer in the field of self-driving cars. During his sixteen years at the company, he also spent six years at Yeshivat Mercaz Harav and received semicha from Rabbi Zalman Nechemia Goldberg.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Rav Navon also attended Bar-Ilan in 2017 and completed a master\u2019s in Jewish philosophy. When the time came to decide on a subject for his PhD thesis, though, he was \u2013 like his younger self choosing a major \u2013 completely stumped. He first considered doing a paper on Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, but was told, not too surprisingly, that the subject of the great Rav Soloveitchik had been well and truly covered. But, while grappling with his PhD, he happened to give a lecture on autonomous vehicles and the famous \u201ctrolley problem\u201d when he was approached by a student who asked him when he thought artificial intelligence was going to become sentient.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n To Rav Navon, the whole thing seemed self-evident: obviously it wasn\u2019t going to become sentient. \u201cSentience means that you experience the world. Sentience, at the end of the day, means you have a soul. There\u2019s an animal soul, there\u2019s a human soul, but there\u2019s not a machine soul.\u201d While he tried to shape his thoughts on the matter into a drasha<\/em> that he could deliver at shul, the more he thought about it, the more it gnawed at him. He decided it was simply much too large a subject for a short drasha and decided that it would be the perfect subject for his thesis.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n \u201cI wrote about what\u2019s called the moral status of artificial intelligence from a Jewish perspective,\u201d Rav Navon explains. \u201cBasically, what the dissertation asked was: what\u2019s the status of this thing that looks like us, acts like us, talks like us? At the time, it was completely theoretical, and I was working [on the basis of] social robots. Nobody had any idea that chatbots would go live way before social robots. But everything I wrote in my dissertation is 100% applicable to chatbots today.\u201d Rav Navon has been tackling these, and many other questions, ever since.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n AI and Consciousness<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n You don\u2019t need to have a doctorate in philosophy, though, to realise that the rise of the current version of AI poses new challenges to what we know about consciousness \u2013 or more precisely, don\u2019t know. The question of what consciousness is, how it arises, and how it works, especially in relation to our physical brains (or, as it is known, the mind-body problem) has been a subject of serious discussion by philosophers and theologians for thousands of years and, however much the more strident materialist scientists like Richard Dawkins may insist that consciousness is just a by-product of complex cognitive processes in the brain, science itself barely knows how to ask the question, let alone answer it. Indeed, as Rav Navon says, strictly speaking, we can\u2019t even really know if someone else has consciousness \u2013 I can only assume that you have it based on the fact that we are both similar biological creatures and, if I am self-aware, then you presumably are too. \u201cIt\u2019s a crazy assumption,\u201d Rav Navon admits. \u201cI only have a sample of one. I only know myself. I can\u2019t prove anybody else. Nothing else in science is based on a sample of one!\u201d\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSentience is just the secular word for having a soul. There\u2019s an animal soul, there\u2019s a human soul, but there\u2019s not a machine soul.\u201d<\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n So, how does all of this fit into AI \u2013 especially if, as Rav Navon says, \u201csentience is just the secular word for having a soul\u201d? It is, to say the least, complicated. Too complicated and too lengthy, in fact, to go into everything that Rav Navon said to me on the matter in our short chat. There are several schools of thought, including one that he personally subscribes to, which holds that to even begin talking about actual sentience, actual consciousness, we have to be dealing with something organic \u2013 a lab-grown brain, basically, which is something that scientists are actually working on, but certainly aren\u2019t there yet.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n If AI does ever become conscious, the ethical questions become immense, not least because, in effect, we could so easily end up creating a new kind of slave for humanity to exploit. Still, as Rav Navon stresses, AI doesn\u2019t need to be sentient to raise some very serious ethical concerns; not in how we affect machines, but in how we allow them to affect us.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf you\u2019re going to treat something that really interacts with you like your mother, your friend, your wife, and then you start telling it to just shut up and give me the answer \u2013 that\u2019s how you\u2019re going to start acting with your mother, your friend, your wife.\u201d<\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n What Are We Becoming?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n There is an idea in Judaism that how we treat inanimate objects has a direct effect on our character. Take, for example, the practice of covering the challah while reciting kiddush over wine \u2013 the reason for this, we are told, is so that we don\u2019t \u201cembarrass\u201d the challah. Needless to say, a loaf of bread, no matter how well plaited, can\u2019t actually feel embarrassed, but the point of this practice is to develop a certain sensitivity within us: that if we are careful not to \u201cembarrass\u201d something so lacking in anything even remotely resembling human consciousness, how much more so an actual human being! And if this applies to objects with no trace of recognisable human traits, what does that say about a chatbot that is able to have actual conversations with you? As Rav Navon says, \u201cif you\u2019re going to treat something that really interacts with you like your mother, your friend, your wife, and now you start telling it, you know, just shut up and give me the answer, then that\u2019s how you\u2019re going to start acting with your mother, your friend, your wife.\u201d\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n I can\u2019t imagine that many of us think that way when asking ChatGPT or Gemini a question, but it\u2019s undoubtedly something of which to be cognisant, even vigilant. More common, and even more obvious a problem, though, isn\u2019t that people are being dismissive of chatbots but that we may be forming unhealthy attachments to them.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPeople are actually becoming friends with their LLMs.\u201d<\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n \u201cPeople are actually becoming friends with their LLMs,\u201d Rav Navon notes of a particularly alarming trend. \u201cMark Zuckerberg even said in an interview that \u2018we are making [AI chatbots] to be your friend. People need friends and they don\u2019t have enough of them and we want to make digital friends.\u2019 And so they design it with what he called personalisation so that you\u2019re locked in. You have a hard time rejecting it because it\u2019s wired to have a relationship with you. It\u2019s not just giving you answers.\u201d\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n The problem with this, of course, is that even the most advanced chatbot is a poor substitute for a real human relationship \u2013 for many reasons, but not least because they\u2019re designed to always give you positive feedback. They won\u2019t call you out for a bad decision or hold you accountable for anything. \u201cPeople push back and that\u2019s how you grow up and learn to be a mature adult \u2013 you learn to compromise and to keep your mouth shut and not say everything that comes to the top of your head. But now with the machine, it\u2019s all good. And you don\u2019t learn to be a mature adult.\u201d Worse, not only are many people forming friendships with their AIs, but some are even developing romantic attachments to them. Though the less said about that the better, I would think.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n The other big issue that Rav Navon points to with AI in its current form is one of cognitive decline. Not of the chatbots or generative AI programmes, of course, but of those of us who rely on them. As our machines get smarter, there\u2019s a real risk that we will become less capable as a result. Indeed, according to a recent study by MIT, it\u2019s already happening.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n Rav Navon notes that he has seen this himself as an educator. He would see students hand in papers that, as he puts it, \u201chave big, beautiful words, but they say absolutely nothing \u2013 they\u2019re gobbledygook. They use chatbots for their assignments because it does the job, but they\u2019re not even learning to edit it.\u201d For this reason, he has begun a policy of requiring a five-minute oral presentation in which students actually have to explain what it is they wrote.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n And he doesn\u2019t even blame them for this. \u201cHuman beings are lazy. And I\u2019m not putting them down for this. We look for the easiest route and it makes us efficient, but at some point you have to ask whether we\u2019re giving up our very humanity for it.\u201d That, of course, is the ultimate question here. Can we use these advancements in AI to our advantage without paying for it with the very things that make us human? At this point, I\u2019m not sure that even Rav Navon can begin to answer that question.\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rabbi, engineer and AI ethicist Rav Mois Navon on why Artificial Intelligence is asking questions humanity has never had to answer before By: Ilan Preskovsky Like all the best overnight sensations, artificial intelligence has quietly been toiling away in the background for years before everyone, seemingly at once, turned around, noticed it, and kicked it straight to the top of the proverbial charts \u2013 which in this case means making it the defining trend of the 2020s, bar none. And that\u2019s really saying something when you consider all the insanity…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":7047,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,144,159],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-6","category-144","category-rosh-hashanah-sukkot-2026"],"gutentor_comment":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7045"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7049,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7045\/revisions\/7049"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishlife.co.za\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}