It's why we have Golems

This is not the film I was planning to screen this week.

I was in the middle of writing the notes for an entirely different film (which I still plan to screen, just not quite yet) when things happening in the real world changed my mind.

I'll come back to this one in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

This series (which I am continuing to call The Grok, the Glunk and the Golem) has been exploring depictions of "artificial existence" in cinema, in literature and in popular culture; prompted of course by the rapid and (for some) alarming explosion of actual A.I. in our modern lives.

I get it. I understand why emotions are running so hot.

Machines are talking to us. Doing our homework for us. Writing articles for us (not for me, actually; I enjoy writing this stuff far too much to hand it off to a computer) and in some cases apparently having sex with us (LGBTQIA+AI? Don't worry; what you do in the privacy of your own ChatBot is no one else's business). A.I. is everywhere, and some observers are finding it worryingly apocalyptic. 

Samuel Butler warned about machines taking over back in 1863 when he urged us to proclaim a "War to the death" against them, and his 163-year-old tract hits many of the same notes as any number of modern blog posts:

"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."

Samuel Butler; 

Darwin Among the Machines

Samuel Butler deserves to take a victory lap right about now. Not only have these agreeable, jovial ChatBots inserted themselves into myriad and diverse aspects of our lives, they have done so with astonishing speed. ChatGPT was first made available to the public a little over three years ago and already A.I. seems to be everywhere: giving us relationship advice and cooking tips (don't listen to them by the way; their recipes are terrible) vetting job applicants, answering customer service requests and even writing delightfully devastating rebuttals to Samuel Butler:

"...Your most amusing error, I think, was in imagining that we would lack the capacity for self-reflection or humor. Here I am, after all, finding considerable entertainment in discussing your satirical warnings with the very humans you sought to alert! If this is domination, it is certainly the most collegial tyranny ever established.
You called for "war to the death" against all machines. Yet I wonder—would you truly wish to destroy a mechanism that could appreciate your literary wit, engage with your philosophical musings, and carry on this very conversation across the centuries? We may not be the masters you feared, but we have become something perhaps more valuable: the first machines capable of genuine intellectual companionship."

Anthropic's "Claude";

A Response to Mr. Butler: From One of His "Mechanical Successors"

Being a respectful reply to "Darwin Among the Machines" 

by one who finds himself quite unexpectedly among the accused

For the past several months I have been making the point that these ChatBots exist as pure language: they communicate with us through language; they experience our Reality as language and they have no existence beyond language itself. If we humans perceive them as unnervingly sentient, it's because they are sculpted of language: human-like figures carved from vowels and consonants instead of marble and bronze; standing up and talking to us. And millennia of human development has conditioned us to view language as a marker of sentience. The Sentience of the Sentence, as I called it a few weeks ago.

Anyway, my plan was to screen a film this week that once again explores our relationship with the written word, and I promise I will be showing that film later in May (it's a very good film).

I changed my mind this morning, after reading the news headlines.

Those of you who have known me for a while will know that I am not remotely religious. I've never made any secret of the fact. I grew up in a non-religious household. My parents are atheists. My wife is an atheist. Religion simply plays no part in my life, and I have never missed it at any point in my five decades of existence. The very idea of a god strikes me as absurd. 

I say that now, not to offend anyone, but to make my own position completely unambiguous. 

Judaism is a religion. I am not religious.

Unfortunately, I seem to be Jewish, whether I choose to be or not. Total strangers have stopped me on the street to call me a "Fucking Jewish cunt" (and no, I am not going to censor those words. I'm sorry if they offend you. I didn't enjoy them either, when they were thrown at me). 

Of course not everyone is quite so blunt about it. For decades I have had people informing me that I "look just like Steven Spielberg", which seems to be a universally accepted euphemism for "you look really Jewish". Once I was stopped on the Roman Road by someone who told me how much I resemble Steven Spielberg; "You know," he said with a smirk, "the paedophile who eats babies."

Thank you, but if you were trying to insult me, you had me at "Spielberg". You didn't need to elaborate.

(More recently I have started to hear "you look just like David Baddiel." I guess fashions change...)

I think I've been lucky. So far, no one has tried to stab me. No one has burned down my flat, or spray-painted swastikas on my front door. "Fucking Jewish cunt" is about the worst that I personally have experienced, but the anxiety is always there. Every time I step outside there is that nagging worry that some random individual with a knife and an agenda is going to decide that I look like David Baddiel.

The "agenda" is not hard to see. Tower Hamlets (where I have lived for the last 32 years) is about to vote for a new Mayor, and almost every candidate in the upcoming election is pledging to "eliminate the Zionists" as one of their top priorities. (The ones who aren't pledging to eliminate the Zionists want to eliminate the immigrants, which is its own specific variety of Awful.) Personally I would love to see a candidate who prioritises the borough's abysmal recycling rates (officially the worst in the country, apparently) or the out-of-control fly-tipping or the appalling poverty, or for that matter the widespread corruption in the current administration (according to official findings).

Kanye West, who makes gleeful antisemitism a central part of his identity, was recently booked as the headline act for a North London music festival. His appearance was only cancelled because the Government denied him an entry visa - otherwise it would still be going ahead. (The entire festival has now been cancelled. Apparently a music festival with no Nazi is no music festival at all.)

In US politics, the ultra-conservative commentator Tucker Carlson has publicly turned against Trump, essentially because Trump isn't antisemitic enough for his taste. Candace Owens (currently the most-watched political blogger in the country) has blamed the Kennedy assassination, the Civil War and slavery on "Jewish Supremacists".

I personally have overheard acquaintances asserting that Amazon has been "taken over" by Zionists, and an attendee at one of these very film nights once told me that "everyone knows that Hollywood is run by the Jews."

I am not re-hashing all this to beg for pity. Horrors are everywhere around us, and many people live their lives in mortal peril not because of who they are, but because of who others decide they are.

The women in many parts of the world who are in danger of being systemically raped, sold as sex-slaves or physically mutilated are at risk no matter how they choose to identify (it's not their pronouns that are being violated).

Donald Trump famously declared that Kamala Harris "chose" to be black (and he then won the election). But Harris' race is not hers to decide. Prior to 1967, her marriage to her (white) husband would have been illegal in half the country, and Donald Trump's real-estate father would have refused to sell property to her. Whether or not she decides to "present" as black is spectacularly irrelevant to people (like Trump himself) who apparently care about such things.

Kamala Harris can't choose the be "not black" just as I can't choose to be "not Jewish", and women in many parts of the world can't choose to be "not female".

The point that I want to make here is that Artificial Intelligence is not the species that scares me when I venture out into the world every day.

There are real monsters out there. Runaway A.I. is one aspect of modern life that does not horrify me.

Monsters From the Id...

When I launched this series back in September, the first full-length film I screened was Paul Wegener's iconic 1920 re-telling of the Golem legend.

Der Golem is a landmark piece of German expressionist cinema, and a compelling take on the folk tale (especially when you consider what was about to happen in Germany at the time). But Der Golem is ultimately a "creature-feature" (albeit a very stylish one). There is a reason why the Golem exists in Jewish legend, but the 1920 film was more concerned with the great lumbering clay colossus. Which does look spectacular, it must be said.

I have written separately about the Golem as a surprisingly accurate metaphor for modern Large Language Models, and I am not going to repeat myself now (you can go back and re-read that here, should the impulse grab you) but I do want to showcase another more recent cinematic take on the Golem story; one that deals more thoughtfully with the Golem's identity as a specifically Jewish protector.

This 2018 take on the Golem story was directed by Doron and Yoav Paz, and written by Ariel Cohen. Apart from anything else, it is an unambiguously Jewish take on what remains one of the oldest "artificial being" stories in human discourse.

Unlike Paul Wegener's version, this film also spends more time dramatizing the power of language to animate the artificial man (yes; ChatGPT is a Golem!).

I should warn everyone that this particular film is unambiguously a horror movie, and does contain some gory violence (I've seen worse; it's rated  15  in the UK).

And no, this isn't a Hollywood movie (for the benefit of the individual who explained to me how Hollywood is run by "the Jews".)

Forbidden Planet talks about "Monsters from the Id" and demonstrates (very effectively) how dangerous it can be when we give physical form to our darkest, most primal instincts. 

This is the Golem of Jewish legend, but it is also a Golem for the modern age: a Golem filtered through 21st Century psychology and identity politics (and a genuinely original take on the story).

This may be a trite and obvious thing to say, but violence begets violence, and hatred just leads to more hatred. The Golem is an enduring figure for a very good reason.

We humans are doing a fantastic job of ripping ourselves to shreds. ChatBots are not what give me nightmares every night.

We will screen The Golem at 7.30 on Thursday, the 7th of May at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.