We Need to Talk About Our Future
Two years ago, standing in the last row of a massive synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I overheard a small conversation that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
It was Tisha B’Av afternoon, and as we were removing our tefillin after Mincha, an old man — roughly in his late 70s — turned to two young men in their late teens and said:
“It is always nice to see young people in shul. You are the future! We are the present.”
I can’t speak for the two younger men in the row ahead of me, but I found this sentiment very moving, especially on Tisha B’Av. Another old gentleman next to him turned and, as old Jewish men do, added a bit of humor to the moment.
“You’re giving us too much credit!” he said laughing.
I couldn’t help but chuckle, but it didn’t take away from the impact of his neighbor’s point. Young people like myself (30) and the next generation are the future, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like anyone cares.
My generation and the next are two of the most politically and socially active generations, treating social justice and political affiliations like identities. Many of us fight for worthy causes like gender/racial equality, human rights, and climate change — to save the world — but some seem disconnected from it and each other. Statistics show that in the United States, the current generation (18- 34 and 35-44 according to a survey by the American Psychological Association) has reached dangerous levels of loneliness and stress, and record-low levels of marriage according to the Institute for Family Studies and USA Facts. We are also having less children than previous generations in the United States.
Admittedly, this disconnection isn’t without reason, given the financial and political instability of today’s world. And it’s not entirely our fault — we’ve inherited a lot of these problems. This is not meant to point fingers. There are plenty of reasons why we got here despite previous generations having the best intentions for us, but at times it feels like few people in power are really trying to solve them.
To make matters worse, practically every business and industry is forging ahead with artificial intelligence, showing little to no concern for the projected havoc it will wreak on the job prospects of the current and future workforce. Worse still, political parties have done little to regulate it — and many show a dangerous lack of understanding of its capabilities and risks.
On a popular podcast, the Diary of a CEO, one guest even said, ”We’ve given up on the children. The future is not the children…the future is AI.”
Our news cycle is flooded with stories of young people fighting for justice and preventing global crises — yet few are engaging with the rapidly escalating crisis that thinkers like Geoffrey Hinton, former Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google and known by many as the “godfather of AI,” have been warning about. Many fear massive job layoffs, exacerbated levels of false information, bad actors becoming capable of doing massive amounts of harm with ease, misalignment, and Sam Altman recently discussed his concerns about young people becoming too reliant on AI.
We need to make serious conversations about AI a real priority. We need to go beyond useless platitudes like “some jobs will go away, new jobs will be created,” without any real understanding of what those jobs will actually be. We can’t resign ourselves to a dystopian future and assume it’s inevitable like scores of people have done online, rather than resisting it.
I am not saying we need to stop all AI development, but we at least need to talk about it. We need to recognize what harm it can do to our financial stability and physical safety, and what it already has done to some people’s mental health and cognitive abilities. We need to talk about how to use AI safely and responsibly to fight for ourselves and our children.
In the Talmud (Yevamot 63b), there is a debate between three rabbis about the severity of neglecting the Mitzvah of having children, and the harshest critic of such people was a man named Ben Azzai. However, his opponents were quick to point out that while he was so harsh of others, he didn’t have any children of his own. But rather than admit this inconsistency, he justified himself. He said he loved learning Torah too much to spend any time raising a family, and that “the world should be built by others.” Ultimately, he died childless and without having made any significant contribution to the world or the tradition he dedicated himself to.
We can think about the things that give us meaning, our needs, and the injustices of the present moment, but we also need to think about the future because like the old man in the synagogue said, we are the future.
On Tisha B’Av we sit on the floor and mourn the destruction of our past, but stand up at midday. This is because if you sit all day and wallow in the misery and injustice of the past and present, you’re doing it wrong. We aren’t supposed to live in the past — we need to fight for a better future.
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To learn more about the ways some are thinking about artificial intelligence and encouraging some of the conversations we need to be having, consider starting with the work of David Tzvi Kalman and Sinead Bovell.
