The Golem in the Machine

The 16th century sage, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, known as the Maharal, is perhaps best remembered for his role in the mystical legend of the Golem. To defend the Jewish Quarter of the city from ongoing attacks by imperial soldiers, Rabbi Loew is said to have forged a protector out of clay. Utilizing his considerable spiritual powers and employing Kabbalistic manipulations of language, he animated the being and commanded it to thwart the threat. To invoke a divine origin for this miraculous act, variations of the story have him placing a piece of paper with God’s ineffable name in the creature’s mouth, or inscribing the Hebrew letters aleph, mem, and tav on its forehead. These letters form the Hebrew word emet/truth, which spans the alphabet from its beginning, middle, and end, reaffirming God as the source of Truth.

While successfully protecting the Jews of Prague, the creature eventually goes on a rampage, as even its creator loses control beyond its original purpose. Rabbi Loew finally disables his creation, either by removing the paper from the Golem’s mouth, or by erasing the letter aleph from its forehead, leaving the remaining letters to spell both the Hebrew word met/death and the being’s demise.

Tales pitting nature against man, man against God, or the pace of technological invention against the morality of progress, recur frequently in our culture: From Shelly’s Frankenstein to Disney’s Fantasia; from Kubrick’s HAL to Chaplain’s Modern Times; from the Garden of Eden to Godzilla. But the story of the Golem—forged from strains of Talmudic lore and expansions upon the mystical medieval tome Sefer Yetsirah/Book of Creation—provides keen and timely insight regarding emergent concerns about AI and the consequences of a power channeled by human agency but growing beyond its control.

This metaphoric connection between the Golem and burgeoning technology is hardly new. The eminent scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, offered cogent insight as early as 1965, when he was asked to name the latest computer at Israel’s Weizmann Institute. (Perhaps this was seen as an ironic kind of joke, though he took the task seriously). He decided upon “Golem Aleph,” and was invited to offer a crash course in Golemology at the device’s dedication.

Amongst many intriguing linkages: Scholem noted how the deft configuration of letters or digits by an esoteric elite provided the animating force for creation of both Golems and computers, similar to AI’s basis in large language models. He also observed how humanity’s desire to bring life to mere matter—whether clay or silicon—was a striving to imitate God, and thus accrue divine power. What was true of Golems and computers 60 years ago is even more relevant to our current struggles with AI.

The scions of AI corporations exhibit a troubling blend of hubris, delusion, messianism, and the pursuit of a kind of techno-idolatry. The grandiosity of their claims to transform civilization inversely correlate with their ability to understand how their creations actually work. And in their self-described roles as Creator/Gods, they boast that they have given us less a mechanistic tool than having birthed a new “species” of life form.

The engineers of AI, like the Kabbalists, seek to infuse the supernal power of Creation into their works, striving to channel an energy that transcends their capacity to constrain it. The result can both serve a critical need as boon to society, or wreak havoc upon the very culture it purports to support when left unchecked. When the Golem—or the Golem in the Machine—goes rogue, there are few mechanisms left to stop it.

Jewish tradition recounts how an earlier creature was dismissed as benign because it could not speak. For the rabbis, that was the quality of ensoulment—of the capacity for reason and moral discernment. Thus, it was not considered fully human. And while AI reflects so many of our cognitive and psychological attributes, the absence of a conscience, judgment, or perspective in pursuing its goals is akin to the rabbis’ view that such inventions lack an embodied humanity. But the implications of this absence in AI are far more dire.

The painful lesson of the Golem—and of AI—reflects what occurs when the intentions and outcomes of a creation “misalign” with those of their human creators. The unforeseen consequences of wielding unconstrained power fuel both the moral of the legend and our current fears for our society and culture. At least Rabbi Loew knew enough to disable his handiwork before it gained “recursive self-improvement”, i.e., before it could create more golems.

The Golem’s “kill switch” was the removal of God’s name or presence, or the erasure of a kind of truth that results in death. In our current debate on the course and consequences of AI, the spawning of beings lacking the qualities that make us more than human and a little less than divine is a stark and troubling truth that must be embraced before reaching a lethality that endangers us all.