What We Can All Learn From How Jewish Law Defines Personhood in A.I., Animals, and Aliens

Earlier this year, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made headlines for a particularly outlandish claim: After engaging in conversation with a highly sophisticated algorithm named LaMDA, he decided that the A.I. was in fact a sentient being, and as a result it deserved legal personhood. Since Lemoine made this claim, Google has fired him, and almost everyone has concluded that he is clearly wrong, but this clearly-wrong claim nonetheless launched a barrage of articles, many with the premise "Yes, but what if he wasn't?" Attention to this case isn't surprising: A century of science fiction should be enough to demonstrate that we're fascinated by the prospect of creating true artificial life. By this point, however, we ought to recognize that claims about the advent of new techno-religions tend to be--to use an industry term--almost entirely vaporware, with exactly none of the grassroots interest or staying power of the movements that are typically classified as religions. Anthony Levandowski's much-hyped Church of AI, founded in 2015, officially closed last year (do religions "close?") after several years of inactivity.