Like Humans, AI Has Limits
By our very nature, we humans are limited. We are constrained by our physical senses, our intellect, our experiences, and by the boundaries of the human mind.
Although we and AI have limitations, human particularization is unique to each person, a characteristic AI cannot claim.
Our uniqueness is especially evident in the way those of us who believe in God understand and experience Him. Like fingerprints, no two people perceive God in precisely the same way. We may practice the same rituals, recite the same prayers, study the same Torah, and even affirm the same theological principles. But our individual comprehension of God is filtered through a mind and a life that belong to us alone.
When Moses asked God what he should tell the Israelites when they asked who had sent him, God answered, “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh”—often translated as “I Will Be What I Will Be.” There are many interpretations of those words. I understand them, in part, as a reminder that God cannot be confined to a single human definition or reduced to a concept that every person must comprehend in the same way. Each of us approaches the infinite through the limited instrument of the human mind.
We each possess what might be called a unique “brainprint”—a combination of intellect, memory, experience, temperament, perception, and consciousness that exists nowhere else. If our minds are unique, then our comprehension of something as infinite and transcendent as God must necessarily be unique as well.
There can be shared faith, shared tradition, and shared language about God. There can even be theological consensus. But there can never be complete consensus about the experience or comprehension of God Himself. How could finite minds fully comprehend the Infinite?
The same principle applies, in a different way, to those who deny God’s existence. Their conclusion is also reached through the limitations of the human mind and senses. An atheist may argue that there is insufficient evidence to believe in God, or that the universe can be explained without invoking a deity. But that conclusion is still being reached by a finite human being operating within finite physical and intellectual boundaries. Neither belief nor disbelief gives us an escape from those limitations.
Human beings can, of course, overcome some of the limitations imposed upon us. Our ancestors could not fly. We can. They could not communicate instantaneously across oceans. We can. They could not see inside a human cell or explore the surface of another planet. We can.
Technology allows us to extend our capabilities far beyond what our bodies and senses could accomplish on their own.
Artificial intelligence may be the most extraordinary example yet.
AI can manipulate enormous quantities of information, recognize patterns, rearrange ideas, generate language, produce images, compose music, and even generate something new by coalescing constituents in ways that can surprise us.
But there is an important distinction between generating something new from what exists and creating existence itself.
AI does not create something from absolute nothingness. It operates on algorithms, data, patterns, hardware, electricity, and instructions created or supplied by something outside itself. It can simulate imagination, but it does not possess imagination in the human sense. It can generate an unexpected idea, but that idea emerges from an underlying system designed, trained, and constrained by something that already exists.
AI can rearrange the pieces. It can produce combinations no human anticipated. It can even give the impression of independent creativity. But it cannot will matter into existence.
It cannot make dust and then breathe life into it.
That distinction points to what I believe is the most profound limitation of both human beings and the machines we create. We are extraordinarily capable of manipulating, rearranging, transforming, and reinventing what already exists. We can discover the laws of nature and learn how to use them. We can build machines that appear almost magical.
But we remain participants in creation, not its ultimate source.
That is the humbling lesson of our uniqueness. We are limited, yet capable of extraordinary things. We cannot comprehend everything, yet we continually reach beyond what we know. We cannot create existence from nothing, yet we can create civilizations, art, technology, music, ideas, and machines that extend our abilities far beyond those of our ancestors.
And the greatest expression of the human mind is not that we can know everything, but that we can recognize our limitations and how much remains beyond our ability to know.
That is not a flaw. It is part of what makes us human.
