opinion
BY MOIS NAVON
Google’s ‘Sentient’ AI Can’t Count
in a Minyan, but it Still Raises
Ethical Dilemmas
W hen a Google engineer told an interviewer
that an artificial intelligence technology
developed by the company had become “sentient,”
it touched off a passionate debate about what it
would mean for a machine to have human-like self-
awareness. Why the hullabaloo? In part, the story feeds
into current anxieties that AI itself will somehow
threaten humankind, and that “thinking” machines
will develop wills of their own.

But there is also the deep concern that if a
machine is sentient, it is no longer an inanimate
object with no moral status or “rights” (e.g., we owe
nothing to a rock) but rather an animate being with
the status of a “moral patient” to whom
we owe consideration.

I am a rabbi and an engineer and am
writing my doctoral thesis on the “Moral
Status of AI” at Bar Ilan University. In
Jewish terms, if machines become sen-
tient, they become the object of the
command “tzar baalei hayim” — which
demands we not harm living creatures.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham similarly
declared that entities become moral
subjects when we answer the question “Can they
suff er?” in the affi rmative.

This is what makes the Google engineer’s claim
alarming, for he has shifted the status of the com-
puter, with whom he had a conversation, from an
object to a subject. That is, the computer (known as
LaMDA) can no longer be thought of as a machine
but as a being that “can suff er,” and hence a being
with moral rights.

“Sentience” is an enigmatic label used in philos-
ophy and AI circles referring to the capacity to feel,
to experience. It is a generic term referring to some
level of consciousness, believed to exist in biologi-
cal beings on a spectrum — from a relatively basic
sensitivity in simple creatures (e.g., earthworms)
to more robust experience in so-called “higher”
organisms (e.g., dolphins, chimpanzees).

Ultimately, however, there is a qualitative jump
to humans who have second-order consciousness,
what religious people refer to as “soul,” and what
gives us the ability to think about our experiences
— not simply experience them.

The question then becomes: what is the basis
of this claim of sentience? Here we enter the phil-
osophical quagmire known as “other minds.” We
human beings actually have no really good test to
14 JUNE 23, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
determine if anyone is sentient. We assume that our
fellow biological creatures are sentient because we
know we are. That, along with our shared biology
and shared behavioral reactions to things like pain
and pleasure, allow us to assume we’re all sentient.

So what about machines? Many a test has been
proposed to determine sentience in machines, the
most famous being the “Turing Test,” delineated
by Alan Turing, father of modern computing, in his
seminal 1950 article, “Computing Machinery and
Intelligence.” He proposed that when a human
being can’t tell if he is talking to another human
being or a machine, the machine can be said
to have achieved human-like intelligence — i.e.,
accompanied with consciousness.

From a cursory reading of the interview that the
Google engineer conducted with LaMDA, it seems
relatively clear that the Turing Test has been passed.

That said, numerous machines have passed the
Turing Test over recent years — so many that most,
if not all, researchers today do not believe passing
the Turing Test demonstrates anything but sophis-
ticated language processing, not consciousness.

Furthermore, after tens of variations on the test
have been developed to determine consciousness,
philosopher Selmer Bringsjord declared, “Only God
would know a priori, because his test would be
direct and nonempirical.”
Setting aside the current media frenzy over
LaMDA, how are we to approach this question of
sentient AI? That is, given that engineering teams
around the world have been working on “machine
consciousness” since the mid-1990s, what are we
to do if they achieve it? Or more urgently, should
they even be allowed to achieve it? Indeed, eth-
icists claim that this question is more intractable
than the question to permit the cloning of animals.

From a Jewish perspective, I believe a cogent
answer to this moral dilemma can be gleaned from
the following Talmudic vignette (Sanhedrin 65b), in
which a rabbi appears to have created a sentient
humanoid, or “gavra”:
Rava said: If the righteous desired it, they could
create a world, for it is written, “But your iniquities
have distinguished between you and God.” Rava
created a humanoid (gavra) and sent him to R.

Zeira. R. Zeira spoke to him but received no answer.

Thereupon [R. Zeira] said to him: “You are a crea-
ture from my friend: Return to your dust.”
For R. Zeira, similar to Turing, the power of the
soul (i.e., second-order consciousness) is expressed
in a being’s ability to articulate itself. R. Zeira, unlike
those who apply Turing’s test today, was able to
discern a lack of soul in Rava’s gavra.

Despite R. Zeira’s rejection of the creature, some
read in this story permission to create creatures
with sentience — after all, Rava was a learned and
holy sage, and would not have contravened Jewish
law by creating his gavra.

But in context, the story at best expresses deep
ambivalence about humans seeking to
play God. Recall that the story begins
with Rava declaring, “If the righteous
desired it, they could create a world” —
that is, a suffi ciently righteous person
could create a real human (also known
as “a complete world”). Rava’s failed
attempt to do so suggests that he was
either wrong in his assertion, or that he
was not righteous enough.

Some argue that R. Zeira would have
been willing to accept a human-level humanoid.

But a mystical midrash, or commentary, denies
such a claim. In that midrash, the prophet Jeremiah
— an embodiment of righteousness — succeeds
in creating a human-level humanoid. Yet that very
humanoid, upon coming to life, rebukes Jeremiah
for making him!
Clearly, the enterprise of making sentient human-
oids is being rejected — a cautionary tendency we
see in the vast literature about golems, the inani-
mate creatures brought to life by rabbinic magic,
which invariably run amok.

Space does not permit me to delineate all the moral
diffi culties entailed in the artifi cial creation of sentient
beings. Suffi ce it to say that Jewish tradition sides
with thought leaders like Joanna Bryson, who said,
“Robot builders are ethically obliged to make robots
to which robot owners have no ethical obligations.”
Or, in the words of R. Zeira, “Return to your
dust.” JE
Mois Navon teaches “Ethics and AI” at Ben
Gurion University and Yeshiva University. He is an
ordained Orthodox rabbi and one of the founding
engineers of Mobileye, which designed the chip
powering the autonomous vehicle revolution.