Golems, Metal: Robots, A.I.
(Possibility to Learn)

The Three Laws of Robotics as proscribed by Isaac Asimov:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.



You may ask how the "laws of robotics" apply to golems, but if you think about it, are not robots golems? They are created by men, programmed by men, and have no free will. And if these laws are examined as if they applied to golems, we know that golems cannot be created or used for evil purpose without harm coming to the creator. A golem cannot do anything except what it is taught to do and what it is instructed to do. And golems have little need to protect themselves, for they were nearly invulnerable to everything but specific methods of reversing and undoing the life-giving process. In tales of wood golems, we know that they fear fire, flesh golems usually fear dying again, and machines, at least the semi-intelligent ones, attempt to prevent anyone from deactivating or deconstructing them. Like all laws, these laws can and are broken both by creators and golems endowed with intellect alike.

In Jewish tradition, golems were not meant to be sentient, to be human. "Though endowed with almost all human faculties, the golem cannot speak. His function is to hear and to execute the commands of his master, which he does without either will or reason..." (Minkin). In fact, the flawed nature of the golem is to mark the difference between it and a man. It also marks the difference between the men that men can create, and the men that God has created. "The golem is not permitted humanity - should a golem show signs of adopting human ways or falling 'into the follies of flesh and blood' (such as wishing to wed, or desiring to study the Torah), it is the responsibility of the maker to destroy it" (Strasser). It is often the theme that a golem, when it learns enough to desire to be human, must be destroyed to prevent it from becoming human. One main reason is because people do not wish for this being to replace mankind, for it is superior in strength and durability, yet they still see it as inferior. The other main reason is because the creation of man is reserved for God, and we may have learned to create, but our creations should never rival those creations made by God. It is the pride of man that he searches for the ability to create a man better than the one God created, and as Victor Frankenstein learned, it is harmful for a man to think he is a god.

But what is it that makes men better than golems? Is it our ability to reproduce or to speak, since these are the things that golems lack, which is why teaching a golem to read and write and further to speak is such a frowned-upon thing? "The faculty of speech (and by extension, reason, free will, and consciousness) is the gift of God to humanity" (Smith). So it is not speech in and of itself that makes us who we are, but the thought processes necessary to use speech. In other words, our sentience is what makes us better than golems. Webster's Dictionary would define sentient as 1: responsive to or conscious of sense impressions; 2: AWARE - having or showing realization, perception, or knowledge; 3: finely sensitive in perception or feeling. In other words, one must be self-conscious (conscious of one's own acts or states as belonging to or originating in oneself: aware of oneself as an individual), and not just conscious (1: perceiving, apprehending, or noticing with a degree of controlled thought or observation; 2: sharing another's knowledge or awareness of an inward state or outward fact). We know that golems are conscious, like all living things, because it can sense the environment and respond to what it has learned about that environment. However, a golem is not self-conscious or self-aware unless it is taught to be such, unlike humans, who know that they are a person and that they are important from the first moment they open their mouths to cry for attention. To be a man, he cannot just know or perceive that he is an individual, but he must realize it.

In the modern world, we understand now that we think and perceive and know using chemical signals throughout our brain and body, but we cannot tie "sentience" to a specific part of the brain. There have been cases of people who did not believe that a body part was actually a part of them, as if someone had stolen their leg and sewn another leg in its place. This has been linked to a traveling blood clot called an embolus which catches in the right hemisphere of the brain, killing brain tissue and causing the loss of ability to detect that part or side of the body. Also, people who have amputated body parts have "felt" them still there. The past explanation was the the soul still had an arm, and the person felt its loss, but actually it was merely the action of the severed neuron and associated part of the brain. The brain did not know that the neuron didn't complete it's connection all the way to the fingers, so when the remnants of the neuron in the upper arm are stimulated somehow, the person can "feel" his fingers, even though they don't exist. Despite knowing so much about the functions of the brain, we only know that in order to take away sentience, parts of the brain must be damaged that cause the loss of memory, motor functions, sensual functions and the ability to tie information together and make sense of it. Many still claim that it is the soul that imparts to us our sentience, but most agree that it is a function of the brain that we merely do not yet understand.



If this is so, why can't machines imitate our biochemical connections and become sentient? Golems were not meant to be sentient, nor were they created as such, but because they have the ability to learn, they could develop sentience. As someone in class said, "We [humans] program ourselves; that is why we are sentient." However, the modern world has already created machines which can imitate thought, chance, decision-making based on physical imput, self-creation based upon environment as well as programming, and even machines that program themselves. "Since 1988, machines have defeated the world chess champion, driven vans across thousands of miles of public roads, found theorem proofs sought by mathematicians for a half century, composed music that sophisticated listeners found pleasant and interesting, and earned livings making scientific, medical and financial decisions" (Moravec). The question isn't whether or not we can create sentient golems, A.I., but whether or not we should. Because we are creating this intelligence within a mechanical rather than a biological creature, does it not count as replacing God as the creator? We don't even need to know God's name in order to create golems of this new technological order, or even have studied a single sacred text. Is it not our duty to destroy these mechanical facsimiles of real men? People say, "they are only machines," but if technology progresses to the point where machines know they are alive, isn't it alive? And therefore creating it is not to prove mastery of the texts, or to complete a mystical healing, or to better understand God. No, the purpose is impure, to further the abilities of man to get closer to the power of God, and the beings are misused, created only to make the lives of humans easier. These golems should not exist, and according to Kabbalistic tradition, it is we, the creators, and not the machines, the creations, who will be harmed by it.

So how do metal golems really work? And if you think that computers are the only golems, then you're missing out on hundreds of years of metal-men. The original idea was to create metal statues, just as stone or clay statues were created, and they would become real, with all the properties of men and of metal (i.e. conducted electricity and heat). Just as the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Compendium describes flesh golems as being healed and animated by electricity, so too does it describe metal golems as healed and animated by fire. This makes sense, as we know that metal gains both elasticity and strength from fire, seperately. Fire first melts the metal so that it can flow, or be molded or beaten into shape, then it burns out impurities, binding it into a different chemical structure. However, the continuous heat necessary to animate the golem would, over time, come to damage it. Therefore, it was much easier and worked better if the golem was created as if it were a living suit of armor with overlapping plates of metal, joints, and the like. Obviously, creating a golem required larger, heavier and thicker pieces of metal than a natural suit of armor, but tale are told of normal suits of armor being animated by spirits as well as those suits made especially to be golems. In some cases, the armor would possess a spirit but not be animated by it, and a person had to wear the armor so that spirit could take over the body as long as the armor was worn. Once mechanical devices were invented, tales were told of "juggernauts," or large, mechanized metal men, not always entirely man-shaped, which would continue their task relentlessly. If you haven't realized it yet, metal golems were almost always created for war, either as unmanned assault weapons or as defensive weapons to aid the human defenders of a castle or town. Metal was scarce in earlier times, not easily gotten, and almost all of the metal was used for armor, weapons and indispensible tools. If stone or wood could suffice, it most often was used instead. Therefore, creating a golem out of metal simply to prove mastery of the process of creation was unheard of. As time progressed, however, metal was recognized as widely versatile, and eventually people looked to its peace-time usefulness, and robots and machines were born.

Often, robots did not appear very much like a man at all. The complex movement of a man was much more difficult than, say, making a wheel that turned on its own, such as steam engine boat turbines and paddlewheels, or gas-powered car axles. Mechanical devices could simulate the movement of a man, but not indefinately, and steam and gas used up far too many resources far too quickly to be realistic for a man-sized golem. It wasn't until electricity was discovered that small powered machines could be made. It also opened wide the possibilities of animating a metal man. Science fiction started reflecting this in androids, "automatons, made to resemble humans" (Data from Star Trek), cyborgs, machines given a human brain in order to give life to a man inside a metal body, and computers which acted exactly like people, sometimes having a holographic "body" which could interact with people in the real world. However, it wasn't until people started learning about computers, networks of microscopic connections and vastly intricate programs contained within silicon and copper and fiberglass, light and electricical signals moving faster than ever before, that the real possibilities of metal men were given birth. Robotics evolves just as fast as computer science these days. Robotic arms have been created which imitate the functions of a real hand, including gripping, holding, using tactile and visual imput to coordinate movement, and independently manipulating the fingers. Pacemakers have been created to imitate the cells which make the heart beat, and machines can take impure substances out of the blood, imitating the liver and kidneys. Computer programs have simulated the actual activity of a brain, and it is only a matter of time before the "A.I." programs are combined with fully-functional robots to create androids.

However, A.I. is still far away. We still do not know enough about the human brain to actually recreate it. We only know how to program behavior, which will be imperfect until we can understand how each function of the brain ties into other parts to control real behavior. We can program a computer to know it exists as an individual or to perceive that it exists as an individual, but it will be some time before we can create a program which will be able to realize that it is an individual on its own.



Forward to Bibliography
Back to Wood golems: Misuse of Creations
Back to Introduction