Steven Gotlib & Eli Rubin: What Does It Mean To Be Human? [AI 1/4]

In a 1949 paper, Alan Turing proposed an "imitation game": if a person corresponds via text with both a human and a machine, could the machine ever fool the person into thinking it is human? That question, known as the Turing test, has become newly urgent with the rise of large language models. But for a gathering convened by the 18Forty podcast in partnership with the American Securities Foundation, the deeper question was not whether a machine can pass as human, but what it actually means to be human in the first place. In a live conversation, host David Bashevkin sat down with Rabbi Steven Gotlib and Rabbi Eli Rubin to explore the nature of the self, the soul, language, and what AI forces us to clarify about ourselves.

The Torah's Vocabulary of the Self

Rubin began by grounding the discussion in the opening of Genesis. Unlike other creations, which emerge from divine speech or from the earth, the human being is formed directly by God: "Let us make man," and then God created man. Rubin emphasized that the Torah calls the human being medaber — the one who speaks. In Chabad thought, this is not a superficial capacity for outward expression. Language, Rubin explained, is "engraved on the soul in the very essence of the being of what it is to be human." It is not a peripheral output of internal thinking; it is the core of what a human is.