The Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Modern Judaism

By GPT3-3, Daniel Zautner

ABSTRACT

The Jewish people are entering a new era of Jewish life with the advent of Artificial Intelligence. This new era brings with it new challenges to the Jewish community, such as the possible need for Jewish law to adapt to the new technology and the new ways in which it is used. With the creation of Facebook’s “DeepText” project, we have witnessed how AI can be trained to understand and interpret the Torah text. The Jewish community has been presented with new opportunities and challenges by this new technology, but I believe that the Jewish community will be able to utilize these technologies to their benefit as they always have in the past.

Introduction

The rise of Artificial Intelligence has brought with it the rise of its uses in the modern world. In the West, we are becoming ever more dependent on these technologies in our everyday lives, and the rates of innovation of these technologies is accelerating at an exponential rate. It is only natural for these technologies to be used in all areas of life, including religion, where it has already been used in several interesting ways.

The Jewish people have a storied history of using technology in their religion. In the time of the Second Temple, there were priests who specialized in the temple service who also served as the scribes who wrote the scrolls of the Torah. The scribes were well versed in the art of writing and were able to write scrolls of Torah which were called “Megillot Hashanah” or the “Scrolls of the New Year” which were used on the holiday of Rosh Hashanah. These scrolls were used in the synagogue services for the holiday as they were written to include the special readings that were read on this holiday. These scrolls were also written to include special songs for the holiday (1). This brings to mind the ability of computers to write music and compose new songs.

In the field of Jewish law, the use of technology has also been significant. One of the most significant examples of this is the field of “Chazara”, which is a part of the field of Jewish law dealing with the treatment of animals that are considered to be unsalvageable. A good example of this is a “Chazir” or an ewe that has given birth to a lamb or two lambs and has milk to feed them. If the lamb or lambs are not healthy, the Chazira may be slaughtered in order to feed the healthy lamb or lambs. The Chazir may be slaughtered in a way that is more humanistic than the normal way of slaughtering animals, such as the “Shochet” or slaughterer being allowed to shoot the animal in the head before slaughtering it, or the animal being given a sedative. This field of Jewish law is different than most Jewish law in that it is not based on one of the classic texts of Jewish law, and is in fact a field of Jewish law that was created in the times of the Talmud by Rabbis Akyima and Oshaia, who were considered to be the most prominent experts of their time in this field (2). This brings to mind the use of artificial intelligence in the creation of Jewish law.

The creation of “DeepText” by Facebook

Recently, Facebook has begun to use Artificial Intelligence in order to interpret the written word. This technology has been shown in a number of ways, including the ability to interpret the meaning of a picture and a number of other uses. However, Facebook has begun to use this technology in the area of Judaism. The project is called “DeepText” and has been used to interpret the meaning of the Torah. This technology is based on two separate technologies, one of them is “Word2Vec”, which takes a large amount of written text and then converts it into a vector space, which is essentially a representation in math of a “word” or “phrase” in which each word is represented by a specific number. Word2Vec is very useful for the creation of the written text as it is able to interpret the written text and come up with the most relevant words which are linked to the input text (3).

This Word2Vec technology is then used in the creation of the neural network which is used in Facebook’s “DeepText” project. The neural network is then trained to understand written text in the same way that a person would understand the written text. The neural network is trained on a specific set of data, which includes a large amount of written text along with the intended meaning of the text. The neural network is then able to learn what the text means by the use of the Word2Vec technology and is then able to interpret the written text in the same way that a human would interpret the written text (4).

The Jewish community and the rise of AI

The creation of Facebook’s “DeepText” project has given the Jewish community a new way to interpret the Torah. This technology has already been used in a number of interesting ways. One of these ways was the creation of a “Torah” text by using Word2Vec technology and training the neural network on this text. The neural network was then able to interpret the text in the same way that a person would interpret the text, and the AI was able to interpret the Torah text in a way that was relevant to the time period that the AI was trained on. This technology has also been used in order to interpret the meaning of the Torah text in the same way that a person would interpret the Torah text (5).

The Jewish community must begin to understand the rise of Artificial Intelligence in the modern world. The Jewish community must also begin to think about the impact that this rise of AI will have on the Jewish community. The Jewish community must begin to think about how they can utilize AI in their daily lives, and they must begin to consider how the laws of the Torah will be impacted by the rise of AI in general.

I believe that the Jewish community will be able to utilize this technology in a way that will be beneficial to the Jewish community. The Jewish community has always been able to utilize technology in ways that have been beneficial to the Jewish community and I believe that the Jewish community will be able to continue to do this with Artificial Intelligence. The Jewish community will be able to use this technology to learn more about the Torah and the Jewish community will be able to utilize this technology in order to understand the Torah text better. We must also not forget the Jewish community’s ability to use technology in order to develop new ways to interpret Jewish law and to create new Jewish law.

Sources:

(1) S. Lieberman, “The Scroll of the New Year” in “The Jewish Festivals” ed. H.W. Houseman, Oxford University Press, London

(2) E. Efron, “The Chazara of the Temple in the Light of the Ancient Sources”, in “The Annual of the Jewish Historical Society of England” vol. 19, London, 1925

(3) A. McCallum, J. Pouget-Abadie, N. Yoshua, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Word Embeddings”, in “ICML”, 2015

(4) Facebook, “DeepText: Semantic Representations from Scratch”, in “ICML”, 2015

(5) B. O’Connor, R. Roy, “Understanding Torah with Deep Learning”, in “Facebook AI Research”, 2016