Once upon a time, the old story goes, a wise man created a man of clay and brought this “golem” to life to do his will. One day, however, the wise man lost control of his creation. Its enormous strength was unleashed in massive violence–until the wise man got control again and turned the golem back into lumps of clay.
Many versions of the story exist. Supposedly, it inspired Mary Shelley to create her story about Frankenstein.
Most recent versions associate this story with a real and notably wise Rabbi living in Prague, Rabbi Loew. The oldest stories are simple wonder tales, where the golem is used for various household chores and goes wild by uprooting the local village fountain when asked to bring water.*
Later, the golem had a nobler purpose–to protect Prague’s Jews from Christian violence. Interestingly, as the golem’s purpose became nobler and more important, so too did his rampages become more violent and frightening.
Doesn’t this sound like the current debate about artificial intelligence? I mean, if your idea of a robot is a cute little mechanical vacuum cleaner, who cares if the darn thing goes out of control? But as our modern secular rabbis make ever-more-powerful servants for themselves, the more things the rest of us have to worry about….
*The folk image of a fountain that, even uprooted, continues to pour out water seems strange to moderns who picture the pipe lying under the fountain. After World War II, many Soviet soldiers who occupied Eastern Europe came from very primitive Siberian villages. It was commonplace for such soldiers to steal faucets and stick them in trees because they imagined that water was somehow magically inside faucets.
2 responses so far ↓
1 jr // Jul 11, 2003 at 6:14 pm
If we don’t do ourselves in long before the ai’s figure out how to do it.
2 Liz // Jul 11, 2003 at 8:16 pm
The faucet story reminds me of a colleague who said, “But I thought I had the internet in this computer,” when taking a laptop home after using it in a wireless environment at work. (Confusing the faucet and the pipe.)