Chevre, this week we restart reading The Torah with Beresheit (בראשית). So we have the creation story, twice. There is the commandment to not eat from The Tree of Knowledge. They did eat and were expelled from from Gan Eden. And one of the punishments was that people would have to work for their food.

As we think about the creation of the world, I’ve been thinking of the steps it took to get us to the level of AI that we are using. And maybe what that will look like in the future.

Beyond getting past computers based on vacuum tubes that took a whole room (by the way, data centers are not 1 computer that take up a full room, but gazillions of computers that take up many whole rooms). The networking technology that allows them to talk to each other. We started with audio signals over phone lines and moved to bus networks and to the more star broadcast network and then switched. And now AWS even has a hugely random network build that seems to add efficiency at scale. The cloud helped introduce and/or accelerate APIs and infrastructure as code. And that lead to the AI being able to deploy things and help us build. They use APIs, web interfaces and help access things faster and reason out things using all the technologies above.

I yearn (and dread) for the day where my AIs can talk to each other instead of me playing the man-in-the-middle. Although being in the middle does help me follow and understand what they are doing. And with IoT devices like smart plugs/switches and controlers for things like A/C units, our systems, automations and AIs can even control some things in the real world. Not to even speak about automated driving cars and airplane auto-pilots.

I heard a Midrash this week that put things into perspective for me. When Adam and Chava were thrown out of Gan Eden, it was Friday afternoon. The story goes that the sun didn’t go down on Shabbat, but it did go down after Shabbat. And Adam was fearful that his sin had broken the light and that it wouldn’t come back. Only Sunday morning did he understand that this was the way of the world. As we grow and explore the technologies in our world, we learn how they work and how they could possibly impact us and the world around us. And I, for one, truly need Shabbat to disconnect and let my mind absorb what has happened during the week and to spend some quality face time with my neighbors, friends, and this week the whole fam damily.

Shabbat Shalom