Tikkun Olam, One Prompt at a Time

A Jewish vision for AI rejects grand promises in favor of small steps toward a better world
By Sara Wolkenfeld and Samuel Arbesman

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Arc: The Podcast

Every other week, Arc Magazine's editor-in-chief, Mark Oppenheimer, is joined by guests to talk religion, politics, et cetera.

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Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.

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Tikkun Olam, One Prompt at a Time

By Sara Wolkenfeld and Samuel Arbesman
Artificial intelligence is our society’s newest utopian vision. Even as the tech giants are embedding it into every piece of software we use, with sparkling icons offering suggestions based on its artificial smarts, they are also treating us to visions for how it can Change Everything. Not only will AI alter how we write emails, draft essays, create art, and do science, but the promise of artificial intelligence, if the optimists are to be believed, is the opportunity to inhabit a wildly new version of our current world—not just our familiar universe, but one better, faster, and more vibrant: one…

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Blake Smith: How does Christianity help us mediate, as you suggest, between the worst sort of collectivism and the worst sort of individualism? Or perhaps mediate is the wrong word, since these two “worsts” do so often go together! Let’s say, transcend?
Julius Krein: I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than Christianity’s consciousness of the division between the City of God and the City of Man, “render unto Caesar,” and so on. But this distinguishes Christianity from the other monotheistic religions as well as ancient paganism and, I would argue, “rational” philosophy. This distance allows for another dimension or perspective from which to approach the relationship between the individual and the collective.