Should Jews Use Artificial Intelligence to Bring Back the Dead? – The striker

A Jewish man communicates with his ancestor using technology. This image was created using artificial intelligence. Illustration by David Zvi Kalman/DALL-E

Imagine your parent suddenly dies. You were very close; Death is a shock. You mourn the relationships you lost and you mourn the relationships your children will never know.

As you navigate through the stages of grief, you decide to take a little detour. They capture your parents’ digital presence – all text messages, videos, audio clips, etc. – and send them to a company for processing. In a week you will receive a link to a tailor-made software: a parenting simulation. It sounds like them and says the things they would have said.

This is already possible. In a recent episode of my podcast: Believe in the futureI profiled a man who created an AI simulation of his father so that his children could one day meet their grandfather. While its simulation is relatively crude – it’s essentially a chatbot – more advanced models are in the pipeline. In China, a company is already working on models that integrate video and audio and allow a person to talk to a deceased relative as if via Zoom.

The technology is not yet commercially available in America, but after years of science fiction depictions and advances in artificial intelligence, it is now close. From a technical perspective, current machine learning algorithms are more than capable of accomplishing this.

Since most Americans have extensive archives of their interactions with others—emails, texts, audio files, videos—it’s not hard to imagine a world in which companies offer to process the digital footprint of a recently deceased person. With all this information, artificial intelligence could create a facsimile of the deceased’s personality. Friends and family could use a chatbot to have conversations with the deceased.

An ethical dilemma

So, should you do that?

Of all the moral questions about AI being bandied around these days, I like this one the best – not because it’s the most important, but because it’s rare that a tech ethics question doesn’t feel like it’s actually been decided for you Forces beyond your control.

For example, if you’re a professor, you don’t really have a choice about whether AI would change your tasks; When you’re a teenager, you can’t really decide whether you want your social life to be completely tied to your phone. In contrast, death rituals are varied and deeply personal. Just as a grieving family decides whether to be buried or cremated and what type of casket they want to use, they are now given the choice of how they want to be remembered.

What does Judaism say about digital duplicates of the dead? Nothing and everything.

Let’s get this out of the way: If you’re looking for a microwaveable, ready-to-eat Jewish answer to this problem somewhere in the back of our collective religious refrigerator, you won’t find one. Of course I could talk about the biblical prohibition of necromancy – but if we’re honest, is that really compelling?

Judaism’s antiquity and deep wisdom do not mean that it has already solved every scenario that humanity will ever throw its way. In fact, over-reliance that tradition has sorted everything out is a good way to ensure that we never tackle a major new problem again. It’s important to acknowledge that we don’t have it all figured out yet.

At the same time, the Jewish tradition could not be in a better position to speak out on this question – for while Judaism has no specific wisdom on the subject, the Jewish tradition as a whole is constantly and persistently in conversation with its own dead past. This is more or less exactly what we call “Torah study.”

Spend an hour in a typical yeshiva study hall and you’ll see people holding conversations between figures from late ancient Palestine, medieval North Africa, early modern Europe, and modern-day America. Furthermore, many texts are themselves conversations between dead people: the Talmud is a web of centuries-long imaginary rabbinic dialogues, and the Bible may be something similar. Jewish tradition’s insistence that the past accompany us into the future is the most important feature of our approach to the modern world.

Of course, Judaism tends to speak more to some of its dead than to others. There are dead men everywhere; dead woman, not so much until recently. Powerful and influential figures are also overrepresented in Judaism’s resurrection of its own past because the preservation of ideas used to be the exclusive domain of the rich and powerful. Judaism, like modern death simulations, can only ever offer a window into lost worlds.

A way to find closure

Precisely because of this harsh restriction, Judaism’s conversations with its own past are ultimately about the present and the future. Our imperfect attempts to come to terms with the past are meant to shed light on who we are today. They should not take us back to times gone by.

Those who would simulate the dead would do well to take the same approach. Deep in grief, it is understandable that a person may want a deceased relative to continue to be present in their life. The problem is that a vivid simulation could be used to pretend that the death never happened at all; They can allow a person to remain in a reality that is ultimately unrelated to the reality in which death is a fact of life.

We can understand this desire, but I think we understand that it is ultimately an unhealthy way to deal with death.

But as the Jewish tradition of Torah study itself shows, simulations of the past need not be about staying there; Instead, they can give us what we need to move forward in our lives. For example, a person seeking closure after the sudden death of a friend may simply want to have one more conversation. A person who has lost a parent may want to give their own children a glimpse into their grandfather’s life. Someone is remembering a sibling season might make an annual pilgrimage to his grave – or maybe she sits down at the kitchen table with a tablet and spends an hour filled with nostalgia.

Death simulations, like Torah study itself, are best served as imperfect attempts to navigate an imperfect past on a journey into an unknown future. To paraphrase the Kotzker Rebbe, an 18th-century Hasidic rabbi: It is good to resurrect the dead, but it is even better to resurrect the living.