By Tzvi Freeman, Chabad.org
The world spoke one language and the same words. When they migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shin’ar and they settled there.
They said to one another, “Come, let us mold bricks and fire them.” The bricks were their stone and the clay served as mortar.
They said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into the sky. Let us make ourselves a name, in case we will be scattered over the face of the earth.”
Then G d descended to see the city and the tower that the children of Adam had built.
G d said, “Here they are a single people, all having one language—and this is what they have begun to do?! Now nothing that they propose to do will be out of their reach. Come, let us descend and confuse their language, so that one person will not understand what the other is saying.”
G d scattered them from that place all over the face of the earth and they stopped building the city. It was therefore named Babel, because this was the place where G d confused (balal) the whole world’s language. From there G d dispersed them over all the face of the earth.
What’s so terrible about a construction project uniting the entire world? Not an easy question to answer. As Rabbi Eliezer lamented, the Flood story provides the whole scoop on corruption and violent crime. But with the Tower of Babel, all we’re told is that G d didn’t like the idea.
So what was the idea?
Perhaps that’s just the problem. Maybe there was no idea.
Consider the background. Humanity had just developed a new technology—artificial stones (a.k.a. bricks) made from mud. People started piling them higher and higher. As often occurs with new technology, they hit the “unexpected emergent property” factor: One brick is just a brick. Two bricks aren’t much more. But once you get a lot of bricks, if you do it right, you get a structure, such as a house or a tower.
The wow factor hit Babel. They became obsessed with their new invention, building to the sky.
They said, “We will make a name for ourselves! We will be famous!”
Not to provide housing. Not to promote peace and harmony. To become famous.
To paraphrase the great halachist, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, fame is the aspiration of those who see no purpose in life. So too, the builders of Babel’s tower saw no purpose in anything at all. They just wanted to build something big in order to feel big.
And that’s a big problem. Because when you use technology without a purpose, you are no longer its master. You are its slave.
BRICKS VERSUS HUMAN LIFE
That explains Rabbi Pinchas:
Rabbi Pinchas said: There were no stones in Babel to build the city and the tower. What did they do? They formed bricks, baked them, and built with them until they built it seven kilometers high...
If a man fell and died, they paid no heed to him, but if a brick fell, they sat down and wept and said: Woe is us! When will we get another brick up there to replace it?
There you have it: Humankind had invented a new technology, and that technology was reinventing humankind. The tower had rendered the bricklayer’s life disposable, while the brick made from mud just that morning was now worthy of tears.
The Book of Genesis is not a book of stories. It’s a book of prototypes by the Author of all prototypes. So too here: We develop new technology to empower human beings, providing them greater dominion over their environment, greater convenience, and a higher standard of living. Yet, ironically, our obsession with technology often diminishes the value of the individual human lives it is coming to enhance.
Think of the treatment of factory workers from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Or the rise of the communist and fascist ideologies of the 20th century.
Or the algorithms and AI that increasingly dominate our daily lives today.
EFFICIENCY VERSUS DIVERSITY
If we can better understand the dynamic behind this negative correspondence of values, we will be better able to reverse it. We could ensure that technology always does its real job and increases the value of life.
So let’s think for a minute: How does this irony come about? We develop technology for our convenience. That’s the mandate we assign it—to empower us. But does technology have a counter-mandate of its own?
In a way, yes. Technology makes a demand on its creators. It demands efficiency. And the greatest hindrance to technological efficiency is this quirky bug that all human beings are different from one another. Our diversity renders us less predictable, creates demands for special instances, and leaves far more room for error. If only all human beings would be the same, technology would be so much easier.
Like with those bricks. If all humans would be the same, all the bricks they would make would look the same. They would all be placed in the same way, at the same rate. The building would go up so much faster and easier.
Truth be told, we are mostly the same. The genetic difference between any two human beings averages at 0.1%—a lot less than most animals.
But it’s that 0.1% that provides us art, music, science, joy, love, drama, meaning, and self-worth. Wipe that out, and no life is sacred. We all become just another number. Less than a brick in the wall.
Freeman Dyson famously called diversity “the ruling law of the universe.” Technology has the power to take advantage of that diversity and empower the individual. Or wipe it out.
The sages of the Talmud were intensely aware of the value of human diversity and the tendency to sweep it all aside when dealing with large masses of people. They taught:
One who sees multitudes of Israel should say (not “Wow! What a whole lot of people!” But rather...), “Blessed are You, G d, our G d, Who is wise about all secrets.”
Why this blessing? Because their minds are all different and their faces are all different (and that’s what you need to focus on).
But when you build without purpose, only to be famous, or make lots of money, or stay ahead of the competition, then you only see a mass of people out there. And your technology treats them that way.
THE ALGORITHMS OF BABEL
Take your “customized experience” of the web and your favorite social media. Truly customizing your individual experience is just too labor-intensive for a machine. Rather, it’s easier to modify you and your behaviors to fit the experience of those that fit into your data-type.
The result is a bizarre situation whereby our connectivity polarizes us, breeds depression, and undermines the self-esteem and healthy development of adolescents. That’s because we are not the master, not even the customer, but the product. The consumers are the advertisers who want your eyeballs. And the most efficient way for them to get that is to reduce you to a blob.
As one eloquent pundit recently put it:
Spotify thinks lullabies are your jam because for a couple weeks one put your child to sleep... The truth of aggregation, of metadata, is that the “for you” of it all gets its power from modeling everyone who is not, in fact, you. You are typological, a predictable deviation from the mean. The “you” that your devices know is a shadow of where your data-peers have been.
In other words, if you fell off the web-tower, we would mourn the loss of potential data to be farmed.
Now imagine you were the master of your own web experience. Imagine that it was truly customized for your unique talents and concerns. These algorithms could be empowering you to improve your life and attain your goals. They could connect you with others in ways that bring greater understanding and harmony.
We could all be building a new, bigger and better Tower of Babel, but this time with a purpose. This time, G d could say, “Wow! Look what My creatures have made!”
But the technology that comes closest to repairing the lost bricks of Babel is the LLM—the large language model.
THE EMERGENT PROPERTIES OF BABEL
How did G d pull the rug out from under the Tower of Babel? Did He steal the bricks? Take away the mud? Shake the earth?
None of the above. Because human constructions aren’t made of any of these. The mother technology and foundation of all human endeavors is neither the wheel nor the furnace. It is language.
Language is the tool that renders multiple human minds into a single network. It allows for collaboration in ways unimaginable for any other species on the planet. And absolutely everything you use, from the food on your plate to the essay you are now reading, is produced through that collaboration.
When G d “confused their language, so that...
