Introduction

From the Digesting Duck to the Mechanical Turk to Sophia the Robot, modern thought has long been fascinated by the idea of giving life to inanimate things. In particular, the Jewish folk story of the Golem takes a central role in the development of this imaginary. With the advent of modernity, various golem-making techniques began to appear in Kabbalistic records. ¹ In order to animate the inanimate, the Kabbalists used certain combinations of the Hebrew alphabet. The most famous version of this is attributed to Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1513–1609), better known as the Maharal of Prague. The story goes that after creating a golem from the cold clay of the Vltava riverbank, he wrote the word Emet (Hebrew for “truth”) on its forehead. ² As a result of this, the clay giant came to life, determined to protect the rabbi's community against anti-Semitic attacks. Once the danger had passed, a variation of the same code was re-inscribed onto its forehead. By removing the letter “e” from the mark – leaving only the word Met (Hebrew for “death”) – the rabbi turned the creature back into a shapeless clod, which is believed to still lie in the attic of the Old New Synagogue. ³ It was this story that Gershom Scholem, another scholar of the Kabbalah, had in mind when, four hundred years later, he named one of the first Israeli computers “Golem Aleph” (aleph being the first letter in Emet). In his dedicatory remarks to the Golem, he concluded by saying, “So I resign myself and say to the Golem and its creator: ‘Develop peacefully and don’t destroy the world.’” ⁴ Both the golem from mud and the golem from silicon were brought to life by code; and in both cases, the symbolic bears the imprint of destruction. This ambiguity, expressed through the mythological figure of the Golem, a being that wanders between life and death, between consciousness and unconsciousness, between what we consider to be intelligent and what we consider not to be, lies at the heart of this book. Often used as a metaphor for artificial intelligence, it is the errant character of the Golem that helps to illuminate the long and vagrant history of “intelligent machinery.” ⁵