Predicting Judaism

There are books about Futurism and Afro-Futurism, but there aren’t any about Judeo-Futurism. However, there are articles on the internet. David Zvi Kalman has been writing about Judaism and AI as far back as 2018. On his blog Jello Menorah he published what may have been a Dvar Torah, entitled, “What is Jewish Futurism?’

In the article, he offers a definition or perhaps a characterization of Jewish Futurism: “Jewish futurism is the idea that our people is far closer to its beginning than its end, that our future relies on development of ideas that are by their nature radical, that long-term thinking is an exercise neither in escapism nor frivolity but the thing that we have been called to do since the days of our foremother Sarah, who set the tempo for us all by literally giving birth to Isaac at the age of ninety, exemplifying the idea that this is a religion in which the old can and does give birth to the young.”

One of the things that is interesting about Kalman’s ideas about Jewish Futurism is that he completely ignores the history of the use of the term Futurism. He works in the vein of Alvin and Heidi Toeffler. His Futurism is a predictive futurism that predicts the direction that things are going in based on research in contemporary science and innovation. His Futurism is Jewish in the sense that the questions that he is asking are about Jewish concerns and how these trends will affect Jewish life. All of the trends that he is interested in exist outside of the frame of specifically Jewish concerns. In this, he stands completely outside of the type of culture-based Futurism of Afro-Futurism. His Futurism is reactive rather than proactive.

What Kalman’s Jewish Futurism shares with Afro-Futurism is one thing: optimism about the future. In the introductory paragraphs of his article, he talks about Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams. Joseph tries to move Pharaoh away from one Jewish mindset - that when things are good we can’t imagine them otherwise and when things are bad we also can’t imagine them otherwise - towards another. “In the story, Joseph advises that Pharaoh must push beyond that impulse, that an awareness of the vicissitudes of crop yields mandates neither panic nor despair but rather a careful plan that encompasses not just the seven years of good and seven years of bad, but creates a path out of the cycle itself and back into the many years beyond.”

You can see Kalman discuss his ideas about AI with Justin Pines from JBS here. It is ultimately a frustrating discussion because Kalman focuses entirely on how AI can be used and ignores any discussion of what values are involved in the issue of the creation of AI, particularly those related to the environment. I mention this not out of political litmus testing, but because in his list of the “seeds of Jewish futurism [his capitalization or non-capitalization],” he lists concern about climate change. There is much to say about AI, but he never addresses the question that he should have raised, based on his own thinking, “Is AI worth the environmental cost?” I am not certain if it is. Clearly, we can’t afford to just add it to our tab with the environment. What then are we willing to give up so that we can have AI without a net harm? AI development has accelerated as the tech industry has been frustrated in opening new markets where they can get explosive returns and create unicorn corporate entities. AI has not been developed for any socially beneficial purpose. While the public face of AI application is in providing a new way to aggregate data on the internet, the primary purpose of AI is to make it possible for tech companies and the entrepreneurs behind them able to present their products and services with fewer employees. To state it more simply, it is a tool to create wealth with a significant reduction in the amount that will have to be shared with workers. It is a tool to create income inequality. What is the Jewish response to this? I will have to look further into Kalman’s writings to see if he addresses it elsewhere.

What is the traditional Jewish evaluation of this sort of situation? Jewish business law is not filled with the kind of absolutes that one would like from a tightly constructed morality. The detailed exposition of damages and contract law that one finds in Bava Metzia is harder to parse out in terms of general business ethics. However, there is one case that is very frequently cited about business law. If a person has a business of a particular nature, say a bookstore, in an alley, one is forbidden from opening up a similar business closer to the mouth of the alley than the existing business. The business model of Amazon is to violate this ruling in the harshest and most thorough way imaginable. One could make an argument that the purpose of commercial use of AI is to bottle up all workers at the end of the alley and leave them to die.

The traditional Jewish way of responding to change is to wait until change has occurred. Once it has, Rabbis can either respond based on their own perception of a need to create new responsa (legal briefs using existing Jewish law to categorize the situation and to derive a response to the new situation based on precedent in other cases), or to respond similarly in response to questions about the correct way to act in the new situation that come from members of their community. We see this in the way German Jews figured out whether coffee was permissible and how they could get it on Shabbat in the period in the 1600s when it was introduced into Germany (See Jews Welcome Coffee: Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Germany, by Robert Liberles). In recent years we have seen discussion about the use of Soda Street seltzer machine use on Shabbat or the permissibility of Quinoa.

To my mind, from a Halakhic (Jewish legal) point of view, use of Amazon should be impermissible as that use causes one to knowingly benefit from a Halakhic violation. Similarly, I think that use of AI by Halachically observant Jews should be barred. The only way that Amazon and AI use can be allowed, to me seems to be, that observing that bar would be difficult for Jews to observe and there is another Jewish legal principle that rabbis should not make Jews into sinners by creating laws that they cannot successfully observe. Ugliness all around.

Despite what I see as a problem in the consistency of Kalman’s argumentation and his disconnection from both the particulars of the terms that he is using, and from modern Jewish history, he has made an inquiry into projective Jewish thinking. He wants to know and plan, like Joseph and the Toefflers. I will delve deeper into his thinking.