Jewish Philosophy and the Critique of AI Technology

With a few exceptions, technology in general and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in particular, have not generated sustained analysis among contemporary Jewish philosophers and/or scholars of Jewish philosophy. This is somewhat odd, since Jews have been among the leading innovators of AI research, Israel is a global leader in AI technologies, and a few Jewish inventors/theorists have either inspired or promoted transhumanism, an ideology that envisions and promotes the replacement of human beings by super-intelligent machines. This paper argues that AI should become a major concern of contemporary Jewish philosophy precisely because AI pertains to the meaning of being human and to the future of humanity. Within the Jewish philosophic tradition, there are views that seem to support the philosophical assumptions that undergird AI, but there are also critical perspectives from which to engage AI technology. Drawing on the thought of Buber, Soloveitchik, Jonas, and Levinas, the paper identifies the main areas for Jewish critical reflections on AI: moral considerability, moral agency, embodied sociality, and moral responsibility. The paper calls on Jewish philosophers and scholars of Jewish philosophy to focus on contemporary technology, paying special attention to AI technology to challenge the cultural appeal of transhumanism, which seeks to make the human species obsolete.