The Blogs: Prophecy, AI and the Preservation of Original Thought

The sages teach that prophecy left Israel at around the end of the First Temple period and that now the vestiges of it are to be found with children, the insane and dogs. I imagine that prophecy entails an element of sensitivity to truth which goes against the grain of conformity. I wonder if similarly the age of AI is summoning the end of the period of original thinking. If so, I wonder which beacons will harbor an element of this power. Will they be a denigrated class like the insane? Will they be dismissed as immature children? Will they even be described as bestial dogs?

It’s difficult to have in mind a dystopian world where this is the reality. But it is equally difficult to imagine a world where prophecy was prolific in the Biblical sense. If the analogy we work with, is that prophecy can be partly understood as transcendental original thinking, it doesn’t require such a leap of faith. AI intimidates with the overwhelming amount of knowledge it can muster in a heartbeat. When attempting to write an article for example, it is easy to forgo the effort of considering one’s own ideas and instead to jump to AI to generate suggestions. I think here lies the difference between the breadth of ideas and the depth of ideas. I think this distinction seems to also have been grasped by the Prophets of yore. We see in the Prophets the remarkable ability to narrow into an issue at its core with a brevity of words.

AI, however tends to manifest as a sea of background noise that submerges original thinking from arising in the space of a fallow mind. Very ironically at this juncture I pasted into ChatGPT what I wrote so far and felt paralyzed by the ensuing comments. Like it was robbing me of my volition and anticipating avenues of discussion beyond anything I would envisage. However, its clinical analysis was devoid of my voice and considered tangents that distracted from the cohesion of what I wanted to write. To paraphrase Amos, I am neither a prophet, nor the son of a prophet but a gatherer of ideas.

We can’t be luddites and reject AI altogether. It is driving the future direction of the economy, workforce and society in ways that we are only beginning to comprehend. But I think that it is crucial that we carve out areas where the sacredness of original thinking is highly esteemed, and not considered bizarre or inferior as happened to the capacity for Prophecy millennia ago in our Jewish tradition. On a final thought, there is the hope of a restoration of Prophecy in the Messianic age. How Prophecy could exist alongside AI is an entirely different question way beyond my pay grade!