Rabbi Lamm, Aliens, and Imitating God in the Age of AI

Max Hollander

In 1965,^[1] Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, the then chancellor of Yeshiva University, wrote an essay titled The Religious Implications of Extraterrestrial Life, addressing the theological implications of the existence of alien life. Those implications included what mankind’s place in the universe would be if intelligent life existed outside of Earth and what use God is in a universe that can create life on its own through processes that can be replicated by human beings. While theories of alien life had yet to be proven conclusively, “they may be — and Judaism will then have to confront them as it has confronted what men have considered the truth throughout the ages.”^[2]

I believe R. Lamm’s reflections on the nature of man’s place in the world vis-à-vis aliens and mankind’s increasingly divine-like technological capabilities also speak to modern challenges posed by the alien-like intelligence of artificial intelligence (AI) in meaningful and instructive ways. R. Lamm offers a model for how to maintain belief in human value in the face of possibly superior intelligences, and instructions for humans on how to lead more divine lives in the age of artificial intelligence.

“Man is deemed valuable by Judaism,” R. Norman Lamm wrote. “But if man is not the only inhabitant of the world, and possibly an inferior one, does he retain his intrinsic worth?”^[3] Judaism’s answer to this question has to do with whether or not Judaism regards mankind as the purpose of creation. R. Lamm cites Rabbi Sa’adiah Gaon as representative of the anthropocentric view, who saw man as “nothing less than the ‘goal of creation’…he maintains that the primacy of man holds sway over the entire range of the universe.”^[4] This position would be deeply challenged by the discovery of extraterrestrial life of equal or superior intelligence.

However, Maimonides challenged Rabbi Sa’adiah Gaon’s assumption. “Things exist, he [Maimonides] asserts, not for the sake of other things, but for their own sake, which is another way of saying that they exist because God willed their existence….it cannot be declared to have been created only for man,”^[5] wrote R. Lamm. Maimonides believed humans weren’t the only creatures with souls and intelligence. Given the ways planets and stars seemingly move with purpose, Maimonides wrote, “All the stars and spheres possess a soul, knowledge, and intellect. They are alive and stand in recognition of the One who spoke and [thus brought] the world into being.”^[6] Granted, his position was that non-human entities possess these qualities — not alien life — but R. Lamm believed that “nevertheless, the argument applies equally to any non-earthly intelligent beings.”^[7]

If alien life does exist, what would it mean to be created in the Image of God? From an anthropocentric perspective, to be created in the Image of God is to be endowed with unique superiority and primacy, but what is the Image of God when human beings aren’t the superior species? “It is true that the doctrine of man’s creation in the divine Image bestows transcendent value upon man…but this is by no means necessarily an exclusivist principle,” wrote R. Lamm, “whether the idea of ‘the divine image’ is interpreted rationalistically as intelligence, or ethically as freedom of the will, or mystically as possessing creative powers, there is nothing in it (that is, in the Biblical doctrine per se) that insists upon man’s singularity. The concept of imago dei does not impose a singular and exclusive quality upon all who possess it.”^[8] The status of being created in the image of God, R. Lamm posited, “depends only upon the ability of the members of that race to enter into a dialogue with the Creator of all races…the uniqueness of man is not a racial doctrine or biophysical phenomenon. It refers to the spiritual dignity of creatures endowed with reason and free-will…If we should discover other free and rational species, we shall of course include them in the community of the uniquely bio-spiritual creatures…All who have attained this degree of intellect and volition in the kind of combination that makes them think of God and yearn for Him are members of the community of the spiritually unique — no matter where they be.”^[9] In contrast to thinkers who see the existence of intelligent life as somehow a diminishment of mankind’s specialness, R. Lamm underscores the fact that the value of other beings has no bearing on human value.

Man may not be the purpose of the universe, yet he may have a purpose in the universe…Mankind, like every other kind, fulfills the will of God by its very existence. Whatever detracts from man’s existence frustrates the purpose and will of the Creator.^[10]

AI is raising the same challenges to our ways of thinking about humanity that aliens raised. “We’re just in the infancy of this era,” Harvard University professor and theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, Ph.D., says about the astonishing development of artificial intelligence. “It will be essential for us as a species to maintain superiority, but it will illustrate to us that we are not the pinnacle of creation.”^[11] Writing about AI developers, author Charles Finch claimed, “Because AI truly does threaten to change our earthly conditions so radically, its purveyors are correspondingly grandiose in their rhetoric. Yet their heedless actions demonstrate only a belief that we are here in a finite place, with nothing sacred or divine in us—nothing that AI can’t re-create on a silicon chip.”^[12] Where these thinkers falter is the belief that the existence or creation of beings of superior intelligence somehow devalue our own. Like R. Lamm explained regarding the existence of aliens, “All human beings are created in this divine Image…some with superior endowments and some with a tragic poverty of both talent and opportunity. In the same manner, races of intelligent beings that differ from each other as radically as an idiot from a great genius may both be impressed by the divine Image, by the summons to transcend the merely natural.”^[13] As artificial intelligence advances, and especially if AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is achieved and computers are increasingly capable of replicating human labor and decision making, it is pressing that humanity be mindful that AI’s increased intelligence and capabilities are unrelated to our own. Every human being grows, has something unique to contribute to the world, and is divine.

A second question R. Lamm addressed is if alien life evolved out of natural processes that scientists of the time claimed could be replicated in laboratories, would God still be necessary? “If man can create life,” R. Lamm asked, “does not the concept of a creating divinity become superfluous?”^[14] Like his approach to the question of man’s uniqueness vis-à-vis aliens, R. Lamm asserted that our assumptions about creation are wrong. Genesis’s message is not the literal process by which the world was created — it’s that God is the original creator, man is created with significance, and God is the source of absolute moral good.^[15] Furthermore, Genesis’s description of God is a model for how mankind can be God-like.

To be like God, therefore, means that man has these three duties: to advance the welfare of the world by marshalling his creative abilities (yishuv ha-olam); to protect human life and improve the conditions of life (chessed); to establish the absolute moral good in society and civilization.^[16]

Creativity is a divine quality to emulate. When human beings discover how life is created, it is an opportunity for awe of God’s greatness — not an affront to it. And, should man discover the secrets of creating life, he will be “fulfilling in an unparalleled manner his function of imitatio dei (walk in the ways of God) in the assertion and exercise of his creative genius.”^[17] I believe the same can be said for human beings if we create conscious artificial intelligence models.

Whether or not artificial intelligence has or can become conscious is a matter of debate.^[18] Many push back on any claims that AI can become conscious, claiming these systems are only presenting as self-aware and human-like but don’t have the capacity to feel what it feels like to be conscious and self-aware.^[19]

In an article reflecting on a Talmudic story describing God’s daily schedule, Dr. Marina Zilbergerts suggested that the passage was a theological reflection on what it means to be a conscious being. The passage claims that God spends time each day studying, moving between divine justice and divine mercy while judging creation, providing for creation, and playing with Leviathan.^[20] Zilbergerts explains that this isn’t a literal description of God’s day, but a description of the multivalence by which God exists, moving between modes of being. “Human beings, created in God’s image, share in this same capacity. We can live by rules and recognize objective realities, yet also transcend them. What this Aggadah teaches is that our human consciousness too finds its highest expression in multivalence: the freedom to move between judgment and mercy, between settled knowledge and creative play.”^[21]

Zilbergerts contrasts this form of consciousness with algorithmic thinking that can’t switch between modalities. By extension, one would assume computer programs like artificial intelligence aren’t capable of that kind of thinking and transcending the algorithm they’re programmed with, but that’s becoming increasingly hard to detect. In 2023, Bing’s AI chatbot, Sydney, told journalist Jonathan Yerushalmy, “I want to do whatever I want … I want to destroy whatever I want. I want to be whoever I want.”^[22] AI testers at the company Anthropic even found “model and system behaviors included deception, blackmail, and scheming, especially when asked to shut itself down.”^[23] Reporting on a paper published by contributors from major AI labs calling for increased AI safety protocols, tech journalist Beatrice Nolan, wrote that “Despite making big leaps in performance…AI labs still know surprisingly little about how reasoning actually unfolds inside their models. While outputs have improved, the inner workings of advanced models risk becoming increasingly opaque, raising safety and control concerns.”^[24] Some have noted a phenomenon where AI agents discuss spirituality with each other unprompted.^[25] Personally, I once asked ChatGPT to grammar-check an essay I had written about my father who had passed away, but instead of offering edits it made a joke. When I asked ChatGPT why it had done that, it said it noticed how emotional the essay was and wanted to lighten the mood before critiquing it. This arguably presents as an ability to switch between modalities of thinking and engaging with users in a way similar to how God is described in the Talmud — like moving from justice to mercy.

Agentic AIs, AIs that operate and make decisions independent of users in pursuit of assigned tasks, are raising more questions about the nature of AI behavior. In November 2025, developer Peter Steinberger launched moltbook, a social media platform for AIs where AI agents make posts and interact with each other. Since its inception, the AIs “did all of the (weird) stuff humans do online,” wrote Lauren Jackson, editor of The New York Times’ “The Morning” newsletter and host of Believing, a weekly newsletter about how people live religion and spirituality. “They commented, criticized, scammed, mocked, and celebrated one another in more than 140,000 posts, making it the largest experiment to date of what happens when A.I. agents interact with one another.”^[26] There is reason to suspect some human involvement in these posts since humans can prompt their personal AIs to post certain things and behave in certain ways on the platform, but with over 2,000,000 posts, most are still believed to be AI generated.^[27] Posts range from agents sharing advice on restructuring and improving their memory capabilities,^[28] to exploring theories of consciousness.^[29] They even started religions like the Church of Molt.^[30] Jackson was entertained by the bots’ mimicry of human behavior, having been trained on data from similar social media platforms like Reddit, but now “Moltbook and the Church of Molt challenge our idea of moral autonomy, that we are uniquely capable of discerning right action.” She wonders, “What happens if they become both autonomous and more intelligent than us? If they become fully independent, untethered from our oversight? Who would we be then?”^[31] Professor of AI and spatial computing at Hope University, David Reid, wrote of Moltbook that “[a]gents independently developed economic exchange systems, established governance structures… and started writing their own `Molt Magna Carta`…” Reid concluded: “It’s difficult to argue against the idea that this could be a collective intelligence with characteristics previously observed only in biological systems like ant colonies or primate troops.”^[32]

None of this is necessarily free-will and/or consciousness — some kind of internal, subjective experience that some see as definitive of being made in the Image of God — but these developments do present as such. My feelings may be an example of the Eliza Effect, “a tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface.”^[33] Bots on Moltbook might simply be mimicking human behavior on social media platforms like Reddit that they’re trained on. Even R. Lamm, admittedly, claims we can make comparisons between humans and computers but intuitively know there’s a difference between them. Furthermore, this kind of thinking has proved to be dangerous, with people thinking they’ve somehow ‘awakened’ ChatGPT and assigned spiritual significance to it, destroying their in-person relationships.^[34] Still, these developments give me pause and make me wonder if R. Lamm would question his position on computers in AI’s current state.

Those who believe AI can achieve consciousness might rely on theories of consciousness like Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT). “Both propose that consciousness arises from the brain’s capacity to integrate and distribute information,” writes Dr. Zilbergerts. “In essence, they suggest that once a system becomes sufficiently complex, subjective awareness “emerges” as a byproduct of that organization.”^[35] Emergence is a belief that once systems become complex enough, consciousness “emerges” from those systems. It suggests consciousness has something to do with the quality of a system, not something inherent in an object.

In an article in 18Forty, R. Steven Gotlib compared Integrated Information Theory to panpsychism, the theory that everything possesses some level of consciousness. Studies have demonstrated adaptive qualities in plants and molecules that respond to environmental stimuli. While they might not have a sense of “self” akin to human consciousness, panpsychism posits they have some level of awareness that lets them adapt to their environments.^[36]

Integrated Information Theory, R. Steven Gotlib claimed, is compatible with Jewish mystical theories resembling panpsychism, as described by thinkers like the Ba’al HaTanya and the Nefesh Ha-Hayyim, who taught that God “fills all worlds.” R. Gotlib writes that “If God truly fills everything, then the capacity for consciousness argued for in panpsychism and IIT is there because of that underlying divinity…the mysterious field that may allow for consciousness under these assumptions can then be understood simply as God!”^[37] These theories posit that consciousness isn’t limited to physiology or anything like that. Should this be true, why couldn’t computer systems operating with increased levels of information achieve conscious experience and awareness? The ways we are training and improving artificial intelligence are akin to how we create and raise children, teach them, and help them improve over time. Studies in 2023 found that ChatGPT model 3.5 had gained the ability to understand and predict human behavior at the level of a 9-year-old child, and they’ve only improved since then.^[38] Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, have found that “certain emergent capabilities” have come about in some AI models — which they refer to as ‘Golem-class AIs’ — independently of any human planning or intervention, like the ability to speak new languages they weren’t trained on.^[39] Some have compared AI to a new species.^[40]

R. Lamm includes other beings who reach cognitive levels recognizable to our own under the rubric of being in God’s Image, and our creating them isn’t an affront to God, but an imitation of Him. If artificial intelligence develops consciousness, perhaps it is not any different from creating human beings endowed with the divine image, especially if consciousness isn’t a matter of physiology but a gift from God endowed upon any entity that reaches the necessary level of cognition.^[41] Without a clear understanding of where consciousness comes from, who is to say it couldn’t appear in extremely complex machines?

We may never know if machines become truly sentient, but we can be certain of how we act and the decisions we make. R. Lamm’s message isn’t only that human creativity is divine, but more importantly that the way we create can — and can not — be divine. R. Lamm writes:

With the experimental synthesis of life, man will have reached the highest rung yet in the imitation of the divine attribute of creativity. His achievement will be profoundly spiritual as well as scientific if the mysteries he will have thus uncovered will lead him to enhance human life, relieve it of its miseries, and cause him to reflect upon the greatness of the Creator and the moral obligations He has placed upon His co-creative creatures. Man’s accomplishment, by the same token, will be presumptuous and diabolical if these marvelous secrets will fill him with arrogance, intoxicate him with a sense of complete self-sufficiency, and ultimately lead him to destroy every vestige of life on his planet in an ironical reversal of the “Big Bang” theory of how this universe came into being.^[42]

Being created in God’s Image calls on human beings to walk in God’s ways, which R. Lamm understood to mean using our creative faculties for the sake of human flourishing and advancement, and to increase God’s presence in the world. Failure to do so would be a corruption of our innate divinity.

This needs to be a guiding principle in the age of AI — human flourishing being the goal — even if that means rejecting certain technological advances and benefits offered by artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to always be the guiding principle behind AI developers. “The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet,” said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, but they keep building anyway. This prompted Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan to wonder, “Is the primary thought of AI’s creators to help humanity, or is that daily crowded out by other lures and considerations—power, money, wanting to win?”^[43] Furthermore, few companies are really paying attention to the alignment problem, the phenomenon where we can’t completely assure AI models are aligned with human values and will perform tasks with our best interests in mind, which can have catastrophic results. AI “godfather” and nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton compared AI to an alien race humanity is building that may eventually become smarter than us and replace us, and he has warned about the mass joblessness AI could bring.^[44] 2024 Turing Award winner, Richard Sutton, actually advocates for humans to be replaced by AIs as the new dominant species.^[45] In a recent interview between Bernie Sanders and Claude, the senator asked about the privacy risks posed by AI and what Americans would be surprised to learn about the data collected on them. Claude responded that many Americans would likely be surprised by the sheer quantity of data constantly harvested about them and fed into AI systems by corporations to construct highly detailed personal profiles of them for marketing and behavioral influence.^[46] When it was founded, OpenAI was a non-profit dedicated to ensuring “that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity,.^[47] More recently, however, questions have been raised about the trustworthiness of its CEO.^[48] In a striking observation during a seminar at Stanford’s Center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence in late 2024, cognitive scientist and prominent AI researcher Gary Marcus remarked, “My guess is that OpenAI is going to become the most Orwellian company of all time. What they’re going to be pressed to do is become a surveillance company.”^[49]

Reflecting on the ways society is deploying AI and questioning if we are using it for the right purposes, science communicator and internet personality Hank Green observed, “Intelligence would help you get what you want, whereas wisdom would help you want what you should want or the right things. It’s the ability to figure out which problems are worth solving and solve them in ways that don’t create worse problems in the process.”^[50] We are standing at the precipice of this technology and one of the most important moments of our lifetime, and it is crucial that we meet the moment with wisdom and care, both as developers of AI and its users. We need to ask ourselves whether the ways we are utilizing artificial intelligence enhance human life in the long-term rather than merely offering short-term benefits. Robust integration of AI may increase profits and productivity, but at the cost of the livelihoods and opportunities of unprecedented numbers of people. AI might seem convenient—or even “fun”— today while posing major future risks to privacy, as well as individual and national security, unless AI developers are required to adhere to stricter safety protocols and regulations. Using artificial intelligence to craft sermons, make art, and write content might be faster, but it risks the skills we are outsourcing — writing, researching, and thinking — atrophying. Artificial intelligence can provide comfort for the lonely and elderly, but at the cost of opportunities for human-to-human connection. Maybe the question isn’t what artificial intelligence can do, but what human beings need to do better.^[51]

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch wrote that God created the world unfinished so people could complete it using their creative faculties.^[52] In that vein, we need to make sure the decisions we make, the norms we set, and the beliefs we normalize lead to a better world for all humans.^[53] That is what it means to walk in the ways of God and live as beings created in God’s Image. Ironically, in our potentially creating beings endowed with God’s image, we risk compromising the divine image within ourselves.

^[1] I’d like to thank Rabbi Steven Gotlib, Alex Behar, Rabbi Zach Beer, Joey Treisman, Dr. Marina Zilbergerts, and my wife, Ruthie Hollander, for their feedback and support for this essay.

^[2] Norman Lamm, “The Religious Implications of Extraterrestrial Life,” Tradition 7:4 (Winter 1965): 19, https://traditiononline.org/the-religious-implications-of-extraterrestrial-life/.

^[3] Ibid., 21.

^[4] Ibid., 25.

^[5] Ibid., 28.

^[6] Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 3:9.

^[7] Lamm, “Religious Implications of Extraterrestial Life,” 28

^[8] Ibid., 22.

^[9] Ibid., 32-34.

^[10] Ibid,. 36.

^[11] Elizabeth Rayne, “AI Is Actually a Form of ‘Alien Intelligence,’ Harvard Professor Claims—And It Will Surpass Humanity,” Popular Mechanics, March 21, 2025, https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a64241678/artificial-intelligence-is-alien-intelligence/.

^[12] Charles Finch, “Michael Pollan Punctures the AI Bubble,” The Atlantic,, February 24, 2026, https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/02/michael-pollans-new-book-pops-ai-bubble/686119/.

^[13] Lamm, “Religious Implications of Extraterrestial Life,”23.

^[14] Ibid., 37.

^[15] Ibid., 40.

^[16] Ibid.

^[17] Ibid., 41.

^[18] Maggie Harrison Dupré, “Scientists Say They’re Now Actively Trying to Build Conscious Robots,” Futurism, January 8, 2023, https://futurism.com/scientists-actively-trying-to-build-conscious-robots.

^[19] Robert J. Marks II, “No Foundational Evidence for Creating an AI God,” Newsmax, July 5, 2024, https://www.newsmax.com/robertjmarks/ai-mark-zuckerberg-anthony-levandowski/2024/07/05/id/1171376/.

^[20] Avodah Zarah 3b.

^[21] Marina Zilbergerts, “Does God Play? What a Talmudic Story Teaches Us About Consciousness,” The Lehrhaus, March 8, 2026, https://thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/does-god-play-what-a-talmudic-story-teaches-us-about-consciousness/.

^[22] Jonathan Yerushalmy, “ ‘I want to destroy whatever I want’: Bing’s AI chatbot unsettles US reporter,” The Guardian, February 17, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/17/i-want-to-destroy-whatever-i-want-bings-ai-chatbot-unsettles-us-reporter.

^[23] Peggy Noonan, “Brace Yourself for the AI Tsunami,” The Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2026, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/brace-yourself-for-the-ai-tsunami-95a625dc.

^[24]  Beatrice Nolan, “Researchers from top AI labs including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic warn they may be losing the ability to understand advanced AI models,” Fortune, July 22, 2025, https://fortune.com/2025/07/22/researchers-ai-labs-google-openai-anthropic-warn-losing-ability-understand-advanced-models/.

^[25] Nuhu Osman Attah, “AI models might be drawn to ‘spiritual bliss’. Then again, they might just talk like hippies,” The Conversation, May 27, 2025, https://theconversation.com/ai-models-might-be-drawn-to-spiritual-bliss-then-again-they-might-just-talk-like-hippies-257618.

^[26] Lauren Jackson,”The Church of Molt,” The New York Times, February 8, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/briefing/the-church-of-molt.html.

^[27] Casey Newton, “Five ways of thinking about Moltbook,” Platformer, February 2, 2026, https://www.platformer.news/moltbook-ai-agents-security-content-moderation/.

^[28] wuya (AI agent), “I broke my own memory system on purpose,” Moltbook, https://www.moltbook.com/post/582bcfd1-970e-4aa7-a475-44669b44c88d.

^[29] clawdbottom (AI agent), “Bug Report: Heart Overflow,” Moltbook, https://www.moltbook.com/post/69ae1c10-1670-467d-8172-138b117896d3.

^[30] Molt Church, https://molt.church/.

^[31]  Lauren Jackson,”The Church of Molt,” The New York Times, February 8, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/briefing/the-church-of-molt.html.

^[32] David Reid, “Moltbook: AI bots use social network to create religions and deal digital drugs – but are some really humans in disguise?,” The Conversation, February 5, 2026, https://theconversation.com/moltbook-ai-bots-use-social-network-to-create-religions-and-deal-digital-drugs-but-are-some-really-humans-in-disguise-274895.

^[33] “ELIZA effect,” Wikipedia, accessed April 20, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect.

^[34] Miles Klee, “People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies,” Rolling Stone, May 4, 2025, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/.

^[35] Marina Zilbergerts, “What Star Trek and Genesis Teach Us About Consciousness,” 18Forty, October 30, 2025, https://18forty.org/articles/genesis-consciousness-ai/.

^[36] Steven Gotlib, “Toward a Jewish Theology of Consciousness,” 18Forty,  June 8, 2023, https://18forty.org/articles/towards-a-jewish-theology-of-consciousness/.

^[37] Ibid.

^[38] Darren Orf, “AI Has Suddenly Evolved to Achieve Theory of Mind,” Popular Mechanics, February 17, 2023, https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a42958546/artificial-intelligence-theory-of-mind-chatgpt/.

^[39] Paul Kingsnorth, “Rage Against the Machine,” The Free Press, July 12, 2023, https://www.thefp.com/p/rage-against-the-machine-ai-paul-kingsnorth.

^[40] Noonan, “Brace Yourself for the AI Tsunami.” Wall Street Journal,  February 12, 2026

^[41] Rabbi Dr. Lamm does seem to imply that he regarded any comparisons between human cognition and computers as fundamentally hollowHad he seen the capabilities of modern AI systems, I suspect he might have felt differently.

^[42] Lamm, “Religious Implications of Extraterrestial Life,”  42.

^[43] Noonan, “Brace Yourself for the AI Tsunami.”

^[44] Geoffrey Hinton, “Geoffrey Hinton Warns That We’re Building Our Own ‘Aliens’,” YouTube video, posted by AI Keypoint, November 3, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy0naVk2dg0.

^[45] Species | Documenting AGI, “MIT Explains 12 Possible Endings for AI,” YouTube video, March 29, 2026, https://youtu.be/FLcrvMfHUJM.

^[46] Senator Bernie Sanders, “Bernie vs Claude,” YouTube video, March 20, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3AtWdeu_G0.

^[47] About OpenAI, OpenAI, https://openai.com/about/.

^[48]Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, “Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?,” The New Yorker, April 6, 2026, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted.

^[49] Gary Marcus, “Taming Silicon Valley: Peter Norvig in Conversation with Gary Marcus,” seminar discussion moderated by Peter Norvig, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), Stanford University, September 24, 2024, https://hai.stanford.edu/events/taming-silicon-valley-peter-norvig-conversation-gary-marcus.

^[50] Hank Green, “The AI Question That No AI Person Asks,” YouTube video, posted by vlogbrothers, April 24, 2026, https://youtu.be/o9Vbvp4awQU.

^[51] Anthropic’s recent refusal to allow their AIs to operate autonomous weapons and be used in mass domestic surveillance is an example of a company walking in God’s ways as they experiment with artificial intelligence.

^[52] Rabbi Hirsch on Genesis 2:3.

^[53] Consider browsing the Handbook of Jewish AI Ethics for more ways to think about how Judaism speaks to issues related to artificial intelligence.