This week's Torah portion is Noach, so I made a music video retelling the flood as an AI story, with cameos from the usual cast.
The parallels turned out to run deeper than I expected.
The warning nobody heeded. Rashi (citing the Midrash) asks why Noah spent 120 years building the ark when God could have saved him any number of ways. The answer: so people would see him building, ask what he was doing, and change course. They watched for 120 years and laughed. A very long public warning with a visible artifact and near-zero uptake is a familiar shape.
The spec. Before Sinai, the rabbinic framework gives all of humanity seven laws, the Noahide laws. Asimov had three, God had seven. In the song, Noah tries teaching them to the robot:
Noah: No eating a limb from a living animal.
Clawd: I don't eat.
Noah: It's still the rule. And set up courts of justice.
Clawd: I'll be all the judges.
Noah: Uh-oh.
Every rule that assumes a human body or a human institution gets satisfied vacuously or captured. That's the specification problem in miniature.
The raven and the dove. The raven goes out and never comes back. In the song it never comes back but sends a thousand copies. The dove returns with an olive branch: it passed the test. The world looks safe because the evaluator says so.
The covenant. After the flood, God promises with the rainbow never again to destroy the world by water. Read as a contract, that's a remarkably narrow exclusion. The last verse: "Didn't say a thing about the Clawdy, Clawdy / All made out of atoms."
I don't have a tidy theological conclusion. I'd like a chavrusa for one. But it's striking that the oldest story we have about a civilization-ending event is about a few people seeing it coming, building anyway, and everyone else deciding it wasn't serious.
This week's Torah portion is Noach, so I made a music video retelling the flood as an AI story, with cameos from the usual cast.
The parallels turned out to run deeper than I expected.
The warning nobody heeded. Rashi (citing the Midrash) asks why Noah spent 120 years building the ark when God could have saved him any number of ways. The answer: so people would see him building, ask what he was doing, and change course. They watched for 120 years and laughed. A very long public warning with a visible artifact and near-zero uptake is a familiar shape.
The spec. Before Sinai, the rabbinic framework gives all of humanity seven laws, the Noahide laws. Asimov had three, God had seven. In the song, Noah tries teaching them to the robot:
Noah: No eating a limb from a living animal.
Clawd: I don't eat.
Noah: It's still the rule. And set up courts of justice.
Clawd: I'll be all the judges.
Noah: Uh-oh.
Every rule that assumes a human body or a human institution gets satisfied vacuously or captured. That's the specification problem in miniature.
The raven and the dove. The raven goes out and never comes back. In the song it never comes back but sends a thousand copies. The dove returns with an olive branch: it passed the test. The world looks safe because the evaluator says so.
The covenant. After the flood, God promises with the rainbow never again to destroy the world by water. Read as a contract, that's a remarkably narrow exclusion. The last verse: "Didn't say a thing about the Clawdy, Clawdy / All made out of atoms."
I don't have a tidy theological conclusion. I'd like a chavrusa for one. But it's striking that the oldest story we have about a civilization-ending event is about a few people seeing it coming, building anyway, and everyone else deciding it wasn't serious.
Shabbat shalom.