We kicked off our lecture with an older Saturday Night Live skit featuring Sam Waterston, of Law and Order fame, advertising “robot insurance” for “Old Glory Insurance.”

Are you worried about AI?  Are you worried about the “paperclip problem?”

Brian Kresge, our lecturer, who is president of Beth Israel and a software engineering leader in his own right, says “yes and no.”  To quote Andrew Ng, a pioneering CEO in AI, the existential fear of AI achieving sentience and deliberately choosing to destroy humanity is “like worrying about overpopulation on Mars when we have not even set foot on the planet yet.”

We don’t know what the horizons are on self-aware artificial intelligence, and there is so much we don’t know about human intelligence that we cannot duplicate it in algorithms yet.  But that doesn’t mean there are not things to worry about.  Bad models, problems inherent to machine learning processes, wide and hasty adoption, as well as a severe lack of regulatory oversight could brook problems for humanity on a large scale before we even need to have the discussion of AI sentience or personhood.

There is also an incredible amount of utility to be found that will revolutionize and improve life for wide swaths of humanity because of AI.  It also has fantastic implications for Judaism—so long as we bring our long ethical tradition to bear as we apply it.