AI Summary
5 min readWhen the historian Malka Simkovich asked ChatGPT to write an article in the voice of Malcolm Gladwell using her own scholarship, the result was so good that her colleague—a tenured academic—stopped writing entirely. “I’m done,” he told her nine months ago. “I’ll teach and I’ll engage with my community, but I will not write anymore. It’s simply not worth my time. The algorithm has exceeded my own creative capacity.” That anecdote, shared during a panel at the 18Forty AI Summit, captures the central anxiety of this episode: if AI can produce competent creative work faster than most humans, what happens to the human sense of purpose?
The real catastrophe is not economic but psychological
Computer scientist Moshe Koppel pushed back against the common framing that AI’s main danger is job displacement. “I think the real effects are psychological in terms of people’s sense of purpose and meaning in life,” he said. “This is going to be an absolute catastrophe.” He distinguished between people whose jobs are drudgery—who might welcome being relieved of them—and people who find genuine satisfaction in creative, white-collar work. For the latter group, AI threatens not their paycheck but their reason for getting out of bed. Koppel predicted that young people entering fields like law, medicine, computer programming, and education will find those professions hollowed out of the very el
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of 18Forty Podcast
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Opening & Series Introduction** - Host David Bashevkin introduces the episode as part of the AI series, setting up the central question: is AI the new printing press?
- 2 (04:32) **Panelist Introductions** - Bashevkin brings on three experts: Prof. Moshe Koppel (computer science), Prof. Malka Simkovich (Jewish history), and Tikvah Wiener (education).
- 3 (18:51) **Opening Round: How Has AI Already Changed Your Work?** - Each panelist describes their personal encounter with AI’s impact.
- 4 (27:00) **The "Asifa" Thought Experiment: What Should the Jewish Community Be Told?** - Bashevkin asks what message should be delivered at a mass Jewish gathering about AI.
- 5 (33:49) **Historical Analogy: The Persian Mail System** - Simkovich offers a historical precedent for technological disruption.
- 6 (38:16) **Which Human Skills Must Be Magnified?** - The panel discusses what abilities need to be developed as AI takes over certain kinds of thinking and writing.
- 7 (46:23) **The Value of Doubt, Humility, and Community** - The panel explores what AI cannot replicate.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
In this episode of the 18Forty Podcast—recorded at the 18Forty X ASFoundation AI Summit—we speak with Moshe Koppel, Malka Simkovich, and Tikvah Wiener about what the AI revolution will mean for the Jewish community.
In this episode we discuss:
- How is AI going to change the dynamics, cadence, and rhythm of Jewish life?
- Should we panic about AI replacing the role of creative human work?
- What can Jewish and world history teach us about this moment?
Interview begins at 14:26.
Dr. Moshe Koppel is a computer scientist, Talmud scholar, and political activist. Moshe is a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, and a prolific author of academic articles and books on Jewish thought, computer science, economics, political science, and other disciplines. He is the founding director of Kohelet, a conservative-libertarian think tank in Israel, and he advises members of the Knesset on legislative matters.
Dr. Malka Simkovich is the director and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society and previously served as the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and Director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She earned a doctoral degree in Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism from Brandeis University and a Master’s degree in Hebrew Bible from Harvard University.
Tikvah Wiener is Founder and Co-Director of The Idea Institute, which, since 2014, has trained close to 2000 educators in project-based learning and innovative pedagogies. From 2018-2023, she was also Head of School of The Idea School, a Jewish, project-based learning high school in Tenafly, NJ.
References:
“Lazy Sunday - SNL Digital Short”
Mechkarim Be-sifrut Ha-teshuvot by Yitzchak Ze'ev Kahane
"In the Shadow of the Emperor: The Hatam Sofer’s Copyright Rulings" by David Nimmer
Meta-Halakhah: Logic, Intuition, and the Unfolding of Jewish Law by Moshe Koppel
Judaism Straight Up by Moshe Koppel
“Yiddishkeit Witho
More from this podcast
18Forty Podcast →