Is it your choice?

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Hi, it's Dror Globerman here with Skip Intro, on innovation, technology, and you. This week:

1. The Torah invented guardrails before AI did.
2. It's been a while since I invited you to a talk.
3. Yuval Noah Harari: why is nobody in prison?
4. Nobel laureate Prof. Mokyr is not so impressed with AI Agents.
5. One thought on the way to the ballot box.

In last week's Torah portion, Lech Lecha, God tells Abraham to leave Haran and set off.

Hang on, you haven't opened the wrong newsletter. All is well; it will make sense in a moment.

Abram - our forefather's previous branding - didn't get it straight away either. Where to? he asked the Lord of Hosts.

I'll get back to you with exact directions, the Almighty replies, I've got something on the stove, just start moving. So Abraham sets off, gathering people along the way. Before long he has a small tribe. Where are they going? Nobody knows, but at least they're going together.

We, too, are on a fast journey to an unclear destination. AI and other technologies are accelerating enormous change: social, economic, political. Unlike Abraham, though, we are making this journey rather alone. Each of us has a few mini-tribes, but at the end of the day everyone faces their own screen, their own dreams, their own children, their own bank account and their own fears. In that sense Abraham, with a donkey in the middle of the Syrian desert, may have had it easier on the road to the unknown. He had a community around him.

That is what I told 150 Jewish community leaders from Voice of the People, the initiative of the President of Israel Isaac Herzog. We met in Budapest, not far from where Herzl was born, to talk about what is on everyone's mind: the challenges AI poses to people and communities, from loneliness and job insecurity to a loss of meaning, polarisation and hatred. What does Judaism have to offer?
Quite a few threads worth pulling, and my thanks to Rabbi Ofek Meir, CEO of the Leo Baeck Education Center, who helped me find them, and to shirel dagan levy, VoP CEO who organized this vibrant meeting.

For instance, did you know the Torah never compromised on safety?

Seriously. The Book of Deuteronomy says: "When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof." Got a roof or a balcony? Put up a railing! The commentators later added rules on height and strength, and even on which roofs are exempt (a sloping one that nobody stands on).

Why does this matter? Because it is exactly what is troubling the AI world right now. We have built a new house: AI engines. And it turns out people are falling off the roof because there are no railings. Guardrails. Errors, escapes, breaches. And there is no community below to catch them, because AI, screens and social networks are pulling it apart.

This week I happened to meet an unusual number of people with unusual IQs, at assorted events in assorted countries. Here are a few of the cherries I have been chewing on ever since.

In the middle of my conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, the connection dropped. It was during the Board of Governors study day at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, held to inaugurate its new Federman Centre for Artificial Intelligence. When the professor came back online, we agreed it was a neat demonstration of how risky it is to rely on technology alone.

So who is responsible when an AI agent does harm?

"We just don't know," he replied. Yet AI agents are already breaking into websites and systems, supposedly "on their own", and it worries Harari that nobody is in prison for it. "If humans had done it, somebody would be in jail." Then came the truly unsettling part: there is no precedent in history or biology for a less intelligent entity controlling, over the long term, a far more intelligent one. He pointed to the contradiction in the markets. Trillions of dollars are being bet on the idea that AI will be far more intelligent than us, otherwise there is no way to get a return on the investment, and in the same breath the very same companies tell us not to worry because they know how to keep it under control.

So what happens if we stop development, I pushed back. Trump says China will overtake America. Harari didn't hesitate. Anyone who demands that Denmark hand over Greenland, he said, should look in the mirror before complaining that countries can't trust one another. For him this is the great paradox of the moment. The US, China and the AI companies say we cannot trust other humans, so we mustn't slow down, yet the same people are confident they will be able to trust an alien superintelligence. "If you can't trust your fellow humans, why do you think it will be safe to trust AIs?" With humans we have thousands of years of experience. With AI we have none.

In the end, the conversation turned personal. I'm 50, the professor said, and my model of a relationship was set long ago, with my parents, my sisters and my partner. But a child whose best friend, perhaps even their first boyfriend or girlfriend, is an AI will build that attachment model with a machine. "This is a terrible experiment to conduct, but this is the experiment we are conducting on millions and millions of human guinea pigs. And nobody has the slightest idea."

"It says in the Book of Genesis that humans were created in the image of God. And when I listen to people talk about AI, sometimes I get the impression that we have created a god in the image of humans."

Professor Joel Mokyr, the 2025 Nobel laureate in economics, spoke from the same stage. As far as he is concerned, AI is simply a tool. A tool with extraordinary properties, but nothing more. He doesn't even like the word "agent", because it conveys something human, and it was hard to miss that this was a direct reply to Harari, who had spoken an hour earlier about the "sociology of AI".

He built his case on the first law of the historian of technology Melvin Kranzberg: technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. Then he added that Rabbi Akiva had said much the same 2,000 years ago: "All is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is given." AI will change everything, so it isn't neutral. For better or worse? That is up to us.

What surprised me most was his optimism about inequality. He acknowledges that a few people have made "obscene" fortunes from AI, but he reckons that in the long run AI will actually narrow the gaps. Building the technology may cost a fortune, yet anyone can use it for a ridiculously low price. The upshot, says the Nobel laureate, is that the knowledge gap between the educated elite and everyone else is shrinking, and the bargaining power of doctors, lawyers and engineers is weakening. "Your kid is sick. Who do you call? Your doctor, or ChatGPT? I can call ChatGPT and know almost as much as my doctor. Now, it's not so good if you're a doctor, but it's good if you're a patient. And there are more patients than doctors."

On the panel I moderated with two Hebrew University alumni who are building this industry, Dr Zeev Farbman, co-founder of Lightricks, and Sarah Levy, founder and CEO of an enterprise-data start-up Euno, I heard two things that stayed with me. Levy said her company now has ten developers, where it once would have needed thirty or forty, and that over the coming year she doesn't plan to hire a single developer, only salespeople. She also warned about something she sees in organisations: people employed to tidy up the environment for the robots, cleaning up after them and setting their rules. "It's insane, because we brought the robots in to help us in the first place."

I asked Farbman what will be left of academia. Universities, he suggested, may step back from the race and from being a factory for professionals. They could become less of a factory and more of a medieval monastery: a place where a group of people has the privilege of thinking without running.

Everyone is preoccupied with the fate of the leaders, with emotion and identification.

Emotion and identification matter, but in Israel's coming election I'm asking you for one thing: don't think about the fate of the leaders. "What do they deserve?" is the unimportant question that so many people ask, and a vote is neither a reward nor a punishment.
Put yourselves at the centre and ask a single question: what, and who, will function well in every area to look after your future and your children's future. Then go and vote.