Artificial intelligence is turning into the next industrial revolution, poised to transform business, the global economy and how people work and interact with each other.

This has unleashed a debate whether the arrival of human-level AI signals the dawn of paradise, or the sunset of the human race. Will the development of full artificial intelligence enhance our lives, as the technologist Ray Kurzweil argues, or is it “our biggest existential threat,” in the words of Tesla founder Elon Musk, which "could spell the end of the human race,” as astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warns? Will it bring on a new age of human enlightenment, or will it do great harm to society—putting people out of work, adding to inequality and removing warfare from human control, even posing an existential risk to the long-term future of Homo sapiens, replacing humans altogether as a new form of life that outperforms humans?

Please join Rabbi Jacobson as he weighs in on this debate and explains how it actually reflects our perspective on the very nature and definition of the human being. The role of AI in our lives compels us to ask some very difficult and challenging questions. Are we machines, which can be replaced by better machines? Or are we more than sophisticated robots? Are our sublime and sensual faculties -- like love, soul, imagination, spontaneity and transcendence -- uniquely human, or can we program an android with these qualities? Discover that the real power of AI is not its technology, but its capacity to reveal new dimensions in the human spirit. And in so doing, will profoundly shape the fate and destiny of humanity.

"If you see yourself as a machine, then a better machine can replace you. If you see yourself as a soul nothing can replace you." -- Rabbi Simon Jacobson