"What is man?" asks Heschel.
An important question in the age of AI.
Are we just a machine? just an animal?
I have never liked the question. Why do I need to define what it is to be me?
It changes every day of the week, every moment; sometimes animal, sometimes machine, sometimes something more; always something more?
Maybe this is the purpose of religious practice - to always be something more - to say blessings on food, to rest from machining on Shabbat?
I am beginning to understand the value of the question.
If I can understand what it is to be human I can understand better what my purpose is in the world, how to live a more meaningful life.
Is the search for meaning the essence of being human?
As such, will a biologically enhanced human still be human?
What puts humans at the top of the biological chain? Is that what really concerns us about AI? That something else will be at the top? That we will be superseded?
And we know that we don't want that to happen; look at what we have done to those that we have superseded, and as humans we supposedly have a capacity for mercy, for empathy, for compassion which it is unlikely for a machine or an artificial intelligence to have.
In fact we choose whether or not to be merciful - perhaps it is that choice what makes us human? the capacity to chose between right and wrong - rather than it be an algorithmic formula or a biological imperative that determines how we act.
Though there are those that argue that we do not chose and there is no free will -are they arguing against our humanity?
The capacity to make moral choices and self direction strike me at this moment as an accurate description of what it is to be human - rather than our "humanity" as there are too many examples of our lack of "humanity" - the awareness that humans have a choice at every moment - strikes me as a much stronger message, a much more motivating and compelling argument for human life than just our capacity to be humane.