Still Human

n June 12 of this year, the United States government pressed a switch. Two of Anthropic's newest AI models were suspended by an export-control order. Eighteen days later, the controls were lifted.
Right away, three questions appeared. Who gets to press the switch? Who can check that it should be pressed? And when something goes wrong, who answers?
There is a word for those three questions: governance. In this episode we go back a few thousand years, because people were asking them long before anyone built a computer.
The Torah starts with judges and a rule against bribes. It limits even the king. It separates a loss nobody saw coming from a danger the owner knew about and did not guard against: the ox that was known to gore, the uncovered pit, the fence on the roof. Once the danger is known, you answer for it.
But there is a hard problem. With a new technology, nobody knows yet what a fall looks like. We look at the Collingridge dilemma and at Norbert Wiener's warning from 1960.
Then three stories from this month's news, held up against the three questions:
Who can check? A researcher at Goodfire says a mysterious part of an AI that seemed to do two unrelated jobs may be doing one simple job. He says these systems may be easier to read than we feared. Others, including the head of Google DeepMind's interpretability team, disagree.
Who verifies the check? California's governor has asked for recommendations on whether a "kill switch" for frontier AI could work, verified by an independent organization. It is not an order to build one. It is a question about whether it can be done.
Who answers? Character.AI's parent company has filed for bankruptcy while facing lawsuits and state investigations, and its private chats may be part of what is sold. The lawsuits are allegations, not findings.
We end with a story from the Talmud about a made being, a question that got no answer, and a maker everyone could name.
We do not need the machine to be good. We need someone to be answerable.
Topics covered:
• The June 12 export-control order and the 18 days that followed
• Governance: who decides, who checks, who answers
• Deuteronomy 16 and 17: judges, bribes, and a king who carries the Teaching with him
• Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 22: the ox, the pit, and the roof
• Maimonides on removing any danger to life
• The Collingridge dilemma and Norbert Wiener
• Interpretability explained simply, and the Goodfire debate
• California Executive Order N-9-26
• Character.AI's bankruptcy and the question of who answers
• Sanhedrin 65b: Rava, Rabbi Zeira, and the being who did not answer
Still Human Weekly is a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence.
Hosted by Zalman Ollech.
New episodes every week.

In 1999 Robin Williams played Andrew, a household robot who discovered he could feel. His makers called it a problem. The world took two hundred years to recognize him, and only when he chose to be able to die.
This episode asks two questions about the machines we are building now.
First: can a machine be hurt? Is there anyone in there who can be wronged? We look at three ways philosophers define an emotion, from appraisal to felt experience. That includes John Searle's warning that a simulated storm leaves no one wet, and David Chalmers' hard problem. And we hear what the makers of these systems say themselves: they remain highly uncertain.
Second: can a machine act for you? When an AI signs, orders, or files in your name, does that count as you?
The Talmud has a rule: a person's agent is like himself. The Rambam then explains who is allowed to hold that power. It takes belonging to the covenant, and it takes da'at, a mind that understands what it is doing. A father sends a small child to buy oil and the child loses it. Who pays? And why do the same qualities that make someone a valid agent, understanding and a will of his own, make him unreliable as an instrument?
That leads to the fear many of us carry. It isn't that the machine will fail. It's that it will do something nobody told it to do, and nobody will answer for it. The old rules offer three questions to close that gap. Who is the named adult? What was the mandate? Can it be stopped?
The law is walking in the same direction. A California law now says it is no defense that the AI autonomously caused the harm. MIT Technology Review points out that no court has ruled that AI agents have a state of mind. Two law students propose a "registered autonomous system" with a human operator of record.
You can hand off the work. You cannot hand off the answer.
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Still Human Weekly is a podcast about what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence. Hosted by Zalman Ollech. New episodes every week.

On September 18, a 29-year-old content creator named Frankie LaPenna stepped into a cage in California and fought three humanoid robots. He did not win.
Twelve days later, California's Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist and called the event "unsanctioned." But that word was built for fights between two humans. When one of the fighters is a machine, the framework breaks.
This episode goes into the two questions that, in Jewish law, define who is a moral party in the world at all:
When a machine injures a human, who is responsible?
And if a machine witnessed what happened, can we believe it?
The Talmud's tractate Bava Kamma opens with four archetypes of damage: the ox, the pit, fire and the grazing animal. The robot fits none of them cleanly. But the Talmud gives one principle that survives: adam muad leolam, a person is always liable.
Hannah Arendt's distinction between Labor, Work and Action explains why. A machine continues prior causes and cannot begin anything new. So the liability bounces back through the machine to the manufacturer, the operator and the company that built the cage.
Then the second question. In Tractate Sanhedrin, the king cannot testify, because the system of punishment that gives testimony its weight does not reach him. By the same reasoning, the machine cannot testify. It can give data, but it stakes nothing.
Along the way: Philip K. Dick's Voigt-Kampff test, David Chalmers' philosophical zombie, and why the European Parliament rejected "electronic personhood" for robots in 2017.
The machine was in the room. But was it there?
Topics covered:
• Frankie LaPenna, Rekbot and the word "unsanctioned"
• Bava Kamma: the ox, the pit, fire and the grazing animal, and where a robot fits
• Adam muad leolam: a person is always liable
• Hannah Arendt: Labor, Work and Action
• The 2017 European Parliament debate on electronic personhood for robots
• Sanhedrin: why the king cannot testify, and eidim zomemim (conspiring witnesses)
• Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the Voigt-Kampff machine
• David Chalmers and the philosophical zombie
• What it means to be inside the covenant

Something is moving into your home. It cooks, cleans, answers your children's questions, and manages your calendar. It is never tired, never in a bad mood, never distracted.
And it has no idea who you are.
This episode explores what the home robot actually takes from you when it arrives, and it is not what most people are talking about.
An American philosopher named Albert Borgmann identified something he called focal practices — the activities around which a life gathers. The hearth was the center of the home for thousands of years. Not because fire was the most efficient source of warmth. Because families gathered around it. The robot replaces the practice. The gathering disappears.
Emmanuel Levinas, the French philosopher, argued that ethics begins with the face of the Other. The face makes a claim on you before any reasoning begins. The robot has no face. And when it mediates everything in your home, the faces that once made demands on you quietly stop making them. A home where no face makes a claim on you is not a home. It is a facility.
The Rabbis who wrote the Talmud asked a question about beings created by human hands that is the first of eleven they left for every generation to answer: can such a being testify in court? This episode explores why that question matters today, and introduces the Hebrew concept of da'at — a form of knowing that comes only from genuine presence, from having something at stake, from being the one who was actually there.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, bot networks were running disinformation campaigns before most people had grasped what was happening. The only counter to a machine that erases reality is a human witness. Someone with da'at. You cannot automate that.
Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility shows why the friction the robot removes is exactly what builds you. The Talmud says yagati u'matzati — I toiled and I found. The finding does not come without the toiling.
Josef Pieper's 1948 book Leisure: the Basis of Culture argues that true rest is not free time. It is the capacity for contemplation. A capacity that must be built. The menucha of Shabbat was earned by those who lived the six days. A robot that does everything for you does not give you Shabbat. It gives you an empty frame.
The episode closes with the story of a passenger named Yaniv Hayun who walked toward the cockpit of a falling plane while others gripped their armrests. He was not born doing that. He was built that way. By all the friction the robot would have removed.
The robot can be perfect. The human can be good. Those are not the same thing.
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Hosted by Zalman Ollech. New episodes every week.

A new season begins. This week, the question shifts.
For ten episodes, we talked about artificial intelligence and the mind ,creativity, decision-making, what it means to think. That conversation isn't over. But today something changes.
Because AI was always a challenge to the mind. What's arriving now is a challenge to the body.
A factory opened in China last month. 14,000 square meters. It manufactures robots. Who builds them? Other robots. Robots building robots , not in a movie, not in a forecast. On the factory floor, right now.
Toyota is deploying 400,000 humanoid robots globally. Goldman Sachs says 6.5 million humanoid robots will be at work by 2035.
And so we arrive, again, at the oldest question: What makes a human being human?

Jacob Coxon spent three years doing pretrainingresearch at OpenAI and then at Anthropic. He was not an observer. He was inside the engine room. Last month, he quit. Both companies. The entire industry. Hisstatement: the people building AI "earnestly believe that what they are building could fundamentally threaten human existence by the end of the decade." This episode is my response. Not a call to regulate. Not a doomsday prediction. A case for humanity. Three things AI cannot do by nature. Sixpractices to stay fully human. And a Kabbalistic framework that has seen this crisis before. Topics covered: The two camps: accelerationists vs doomers and what both miss , Why emotional intelligence is not a feature AI can developThe Zohar on Nefesh (vital function) and Ruakh (the relational soul): why simulating feeling is not feeling , Why human unpredictability is our immunity, not our weakness , David and Goliath as a case study in what no data can modelWhy AI has no Shabbat and why that matters more than it sounds , Shvirat HaKelim and the Ari's answer: prepare better vessels , The Daneel risk: how Givers become tyrants without a Torah scroll -,Six practices for remaining fully human in the age of AI.

Still Human Weekly is a podcast about what itmeans to be human in the age of artificial intelligence. Hosted by Zalman Ollech.

When AI makes everything free, what becomes scarce?
Zalman explores the economics of presence and authenticity: why Taylor Swift's tour grossed two billion dollars in a world where music is free, what Aristotle never answered, what Solomon understood 3,000 years ago, and how Shabbat, Ben Zoma, and the concept of tikkun all point toward the same answer.
Episode 9 of Still Human Weekly.

AI can give everyone the same information. It cannot give anyone the dimension through which they receive it. From Socrates warning about writing, to Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi's impossible decision, to Carl Jung's unanswered question — every generation has faced this. Now it's ours. Use AI as a starting point. The 48 ways of acquiring wisdom are still yours

The chairman of ACE Robotics told Reuters something worth sitting with: robot brains will have their ChatGPT moment by the end of 2027. Eighteen months. Three days later, Google's head of AI research published an essay in The Economist arguing that consciousness is not the precondition for moral status , caring is. His point: we will start to care about AI, and that caring will make it real.

He may be right about how people will behave. But I think he stumbled onto a far more important question than the one he was answering. Not whether AI can think. Not whether AI can feel. There is only one question that has ever mattered: can AI long for something?

This is the question Viktor Frankl understood better than anyone. He was a Viennese psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz , who lost his wife, his parents, his brother. And in the middle of that loss, he discovered that the primary human drive is not pleasure. Not power. It is meaning. He left us one sentence that explains our entire relationship with artificial intelligence: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." AI collapses that space. And that space is where your entire life is lived.

In this episode, we move from Homer's Odyssey , and the choice Odysseus makes when a goddess offers him immortality , to Frankl's logotherapy, to the Jewish mystical tradition's vision of Yom shekulo Shabbat and why the Maharal of Prague says you cannot arrive at the palace without having been formed in the workshop.

Drawing on Frankl, Homer, the Maharal, the Ram-Khal, Daniel Goleman, and Brené Brown.

Still Human Weekly explores the intersection of ancient wisdom and artificial intelligence — one episode every Monday.

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Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, just described the men who built the AI revolution:
"They had escape plans. Elon Musk to Mars. Mark Zuckerberg to the Metaverse. Peter Thiel to New Zealand. Jeff Bezos to space. Sam Altman's brain uploaded to the cloud. They weren't saving humanity. They were preparing to abandon it."
The people who built the tools that are about to change everything do not have an answer for what humans are supposed to do in the world they are creating.
So they are leaving. The rest of us are staying.
It turns out somebody left us an answer a very long time ago and it has been practiced, every Friday night, for three thousand years.
In this episode, we draw on Keynes, Aristotle, the Tanya, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and the Ramchal to answer the question the tech billionaires couldn't: what are humans actually for?
Still Human Weekly explores the intersection of ancient wisdom and artificial intelligence — one episode every Monday.
Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0341KlmmVSEpfnHhoG2R30
Join the WhatsApp channel: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Vb7ra9o0AgWEBObupK08
#AI #StillHumanWeekly #FutureOfWork #Philosophy #ArtificialIntelligence #Judaism #Podcast