Artificial Intelligence Could Revolutionize the Study of Jewish Law. Is That a Good Thing?

As early as the 1960s, scholars and technicians began the task of digitizing halakhic literature, making it possible to search quickly through an ever-growing group of texts. Technological advances since then have improved the quality of searches, sped up the pace of digitization, and made such tools accessible to anyone with smartphone. Now, write Moshe Koppel and Avi Shmidman, machine learning and artificial intelligence can do much more: they can make texts penetrable to the lay reader by adding vowel-markings and punctuation while spelling out abbreviations, create critical editions by comparing early editions and manuscripts, and even compose lists of sources on a single topic.

After explaining the vast potential created by these new technologies, Koppel and Shmidman discuss both their benefits and their costs, beginning with the fact that a layperson will soon be able to navigate a textual tradition with an ease previously reserved for the sophisticated scholar:

On the one hand, this [change] is a blessing: it broadens the circle of those participating in one of the defining activities of Judaism, [namely Torah study], including those on the geographic or social periphery of Jewish life. [On the other hand], the traditional process of transmission of Torah from teacher to student and from generation to generation is such that much more than raw text or hard information is transmitted. Subtleties of emphasis and attitudewhich topics are central, what is a legitimate question, who is an authority, what is the appropriate degree of deference to such authorities, which values should be emphasized and which honored only in the breach, when must exceptions be made, and much moreare transmitted as well.

All this could be lost, or at least greatly undervalued, as the transmission process is partially short-circuited by technology; indeed, signs of this phenomenon are already evident with the availability of many Jewish texts on the Internet.

And moving further into the future, what if computer scientists could create a sort of robot rabbi, using the same sort of artificial intelligence that has been used to defeat the greatest chess masters or Jeopardy champions?

[S]uch a tool could very well turn out to be corrosive, and for a number of reasons. First, programs must define raw inputs upfront, and these inputs must be limited to those that are somehow measurable. The difficult-to-measure human elements that a competent[halakhic authority]would take into account would likely be ignored by such programs. Second, the study of halakhah might be reduced from an engaging and immersive experience to a mechanical process with little grip on the soul.

Third, just as habitual use of navigation tools like Waze diminish our navigating skills, habitual use of digital tools for[answering questions of Jewish law]is likely to dry up our halakhic intuitions. In fact, framing halakhah as nothing but a programmable function that maps situations to outputs likedo/dontis likely to reduce it in our minds from an exalted heritage to one arbitrary function among many theoretically possible ones.