On God and LLMs - Cal Newport

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The second chapter of Genesis poetically describes the beginning of the human story. “The Lord formed Adam from the dust of the earth,” it reads. “He blew into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.”

There are different ways to translate the Hebrew term rendered here as “living being.” Onkelos, a Roman nobleman turned Torah scholar, interpreted it to mean “speaking spirit” (in Aramaic: ruach memalela). As Rabbi Shai Held elaborates in the second volume of ​The Heart of the Torah​, Onkelos’s translation implies that “speech is constitutive of what it means to be a human – a core part of our humanity is our ability to communicate with words.”

Onkelos is not the only scholar to explore this concept. As Held also explains:

“According to [the medieval commentator] Rashi, speech is thus not only central to who we are as human beings, it is also key to our uniqueness. Alone among God’s creations, Jewish tradition affirms, human beings are capable of speech.”

The original scribes of the Hebrew Bible were reflecting the central role words have played in the post-Paleolithic human experience. They allow us to alchemize our state of mind into vocalized phonemes or written letters that can then be decoded in the mind of the receiver – a miraculous and intimate act of human-to-human telepathy. It was also arguably the rise of alphabet systems in the ancient Near East and the literacy they enabled that democratized holiness and, in doing so, birthed the notions of human dignity and universal justice that we take for granted today. Speech matters.

I’ve been thinking about this recently as I grapple with some of the consequences of the generative AI revolution. Like many people, I feel a general sense of unease when holding a fluent conversation with a chatbot. I understand that this lexical fluidity is merely an illusion – the result of endless matrix multiplications, autoregressively generating one token after another – but it still creates a discomforting sense of transgression.

The sacredness of speech helps explain these feelings. It also raises some deep questions.

Should we be so quick to extend the role of ruach memalela to machines, allowing them, seemingly all at once, to become active participants in a ritual so defining to our experience? Should we let AI write and speak on our behalf, or serve as a golemic conversation partner when authentic human companionship isn’t readily available? Something about this, for lack of a better word, feels profane.

I don’t have definitive answers here. But one thing that seems clear is that the newly emerging field of digital ethics (in which ​I’m currently active)​ is in the same place today as bioethics was five decades earlier, when new medical technologies began to force tough moral quandaries.

Which is all to say: before we blindly embrace whatever AI product Sam Altman or Dario Amodei declares to be inevitable, we still have a lot of work to do in figuring out ​what we’re willing to accept​.

1 thought on “On God and LLMs”

"In the beginning was the Word (Logos)." I read an ostensibly Christian pastor a few months ago who, using the Aristotelian framing, advised that it was okay to use AI to help with the logos but not with the pathos or the ethos of one’s sermon. People truly are losing their minds. And for those who believe in such things as souls – it’s getting pretty weird and scary.

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Cal launched the "Study Hacks" blog at calnewport.com in 2007, and has been regularly publishing essays here ever since. Over 2,000,000 people a year visit this site to read Cal's weekly posts about technology, productivity, and the quest to live and work deeply in an increasingly distracted world, while tens of thousands more subscribe to have these essays delivered directly to their inbox (see the sign-up form below). To read more, you can browse more than 15 years of past essays in the archive.<br>In the fall of 2022, Cal launched a new portal, TheDeepLife.com, to serve as the online home for all other content relevant to the deep life movement he helped initiate. Here you can find all past episodes of Cal's popular podcast, Deep Questions, and explore an extensive library of original videos.

This site is the online home for the computer science professor and bestselling author Cal Newport. Here you can learn more about Cal and both his general-audience and academic writing. You can also browse and subscribe to his long-running weekly essay series. For more on Cal's podcast, videos, and online courses, please visit his media portal, TheDeepLife.com

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