I recently spoke at a conference of rabbis and bishops to address the question of what AI’s acceleration will mean for the dignity of the human being. Jewish and Christian theologians derive human dignity from the verse in Genesis that says the human being is created in the image of God. (Genesis 1:27)
Below is the paper I presented:
Does AI obscure the divine image in the human person?
To answer this, we must first know what the divine image is—and here we immediately encounter a problem. Genesis gives us not one but two creation accounts, and they present seemingly incompatible pictures of what it means to be human.
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the architect of Modern Orthodox thought, built his theological anthropology on this tension. In The Lonely Man of Faith (1965), he argues that these aren’t competing narratives to be harmonized but a dialectic to be lived. We are simultaneously two Adams, and the contradiction between them constitutes human existence.
Adam the First (Genesis 1) is majestic man, created in God’s image, commanded to “fill the earth and conquer it” (kivshuha). This Adam is the technological creator, the builder, the one who transforms raw nature into civilization. He achieves dignity through mastery, through imposing form on chaos, through the creative conquest of his environment.
Adam the Second (Genesis 2) is covenantal man, formed from dust, placed in a garden he didn’t make, told “it is not good to be alone.” This Adam is vulnerable, relational, addressed by God in intimate dialogue. He achieves redemption not through conquest but through covenant, through responding to being called, through the humility of receiving rather than taking.
Soloveitchik insists we need both. Adam I without Adam II becomes tyrannical—pure instrumental mastery with no telos beyond efficiency. Adam II without Adam I becomes passive—pure receptivity with no creative agency. The Lonely Man of Faith is lonely precisely because modernity celebrates only Adam I while the religious community often understands only Adam II.
I want to argue that artificial intelligence is the ultimate technology of Adam the First—and that it therefore forces us to distinguish between the two Adams more sharply than ever before. But I will also argue something more surprising: that AI clarifies what the divine image actually is by revealing what it isn’t. And further: that rightly understood, AI can serve Adam II’s purposes precisely by liberating us from mistaking Adam I’s mastery for the totality of human dignity.
II. Soloveitchik’s Two Adams: The Dialectic
Adam the First: Majestic Man
Genesis 1 presents creation as a six-day process culminating in humanity: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, all the earth...” (1:26).
This Adam receives a mandate: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and conquer it [”kivshuha]” (1:28). The verb kavash means to subdue, to bring under control, to master—used elsewhere for military conquest, for treading grapes in a winepress. Forceful transformation of the resistant.
Soloveitchik sees Adam I as homo faber, man the maker. His calling is to transform the world through technology, to impose rational order on chaos, to create civilization. This Adam builds cities, develops agriculture, invents tools, discovers scientific laws. His greatness lies in functional control—in understanding how things work and bending them to human purposes.
“Adam the first is interested in just one thing: majestic control and conquest of the universe,” Soloveitchik writes. His question is always: How does this work? How can I use it? How can I improve it? He measures success through effectiveness, through the expansion of human capability, through dignity achieved via creative mastery.
This is not evil—it’s essential. Without Adam I, we’d have no medicine, no agriculture, no protection from the elements. The command to “fill and conquer” is divine, not demonic.
Adam the Second: Covenantal Man
Genesis 2 tells a different story. Here God forms (yatzar—like a potter working clay) the human from dust, breathes into his nostrils, and places him in a garden God planted. This Adam doesn’t conquer—he’s placed. He doesn’t master—he tends and keeps (le’ovdah u’leshomrah) what he’s been given.
The first thing God says about this Adam: “It is not good for the human to be alone” (2:18). Not “he needs help with the gardening” but he needs an other. His fundamental condition is relational, not functional.
When God brings the animals to Adam for naming, none proves an ezer kenegdo—a helper “corresponding to him” or literally “against him.” Finally Eve, and Adam’s response isn’t functional analysis but poetry: “This at last is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh” (2:23). Recognition, not use.
Soloveitchik calls this Adam II, homo religiosus, man in covenant. His question isn’t “How does this work?” but “What does this mean? To whom do I belong? Who addresses me? What is demanded of me?”
Adam II’s dignity comes not from mastery but from response—from the capacity to hear a call meant specifically for him and to answer hineni, here I am. His greatness lies not in control but in faithfulness, in maintaining covenant even when it’s costly, in choosing relationship over efficiency.
The Permanent Tension
These two Adams aren’t stages we pass through. They’re permanent polarities. We are both, simultaneously, in tension.
Adam I asks: Can I do it? Adam II asks: Should I do it? Adam I creates; Adam II receives. Adam I conquers; Adam II covenants. Adam I measures success; Adam II experiences meaning.
The tragedy of modernity, according to Soloveitchik, is that we’ve forgotten how to be Adam II. We excel at functional analysis, technological mastery, instrumental rationality—but we’ve lost the language of covenant, of being addressed, of responding to claims that don’t derive from our own projects.
The Lonely Man of Faith is lonely because he lives the dialectic—he needs both Adams but finds communities that honor only one.
III. Creation as Aesthetic Act: What Does It Mean That God Creates?
The Divine Artist
Genesis doesn’t present creation as mere manufacture. God doesn’t assemble the world from pre-existing materials. Instead, creation unfolds as an aesthetic performance: “And God said, let there be...” The world emerges through divine speech, through an act of expression.
After each creative act: “And God saw that it was good (tov).” On the sixth day: “And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good (tov me’od).”
The Hebrew tov means both “good” and “beautiful,” both “right” and “fitting.” God’s evaluation is simultaneously moral and aesthetic. The creation works (it’s functional) but it’s also beautiful (it has form, proportion, rightness).
The Kabbalists saw this clearly. In Lurianic thought, creation involves tzimtzum—divine self-contraction. God withdraws to make space for the world. But this withdrawal is also an aesthetic act: God creates by imposing limit, by choosing this rather than that, by giving particular form to infinite possibility.
Any artist knows: creativity requires constraint. The infinite canvas must give way to chosen forms. God’s creation is aesthetic because it involves the judgment to actualize certain possibilities while holding others back.
The Image: Particular Style
“Let us make man in our image (b’tzalmeinu), according to our likeness (kidmuteinu)” (Genesis 1:26). What is this tzelem?
Not physical form—God has no body. Not generic rationality—that’s too abstract. I want to propose: Tzelem Elohim means the capacity for particular style—the unique way this consciousness expresses universal human possibility.
The Talmud (Sanhedrin 37a) tells us that God stamps all humans from one mold, yet “not one resembles another.” Here’s the paradox: We share universal humanity (one mold) but achieve it only through radical particularity (each is unique). The divine signature isn’t the mold—it’s the fact that identical replication is impossible. God’s signature is that each human bears the image uniquely.
Avot d’Rabbi Natan 31: “Therefore, each person must say: ‘For my sake the world was created.’”
The Chassidic intensification: Rabbi Zusya: “In the world to come, they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” Each soul has its own portion of Torah, its unique way of serving God.
To be created b’tzelem Elohim is to be called to express divine creativity through your particular, unrepeatable style of existence. To be in the divine image is to find your style of being human. Not a way among many equivalent options, but your way—the particular inflection of universal humanity that only you can sound.
This is why the Torah obsesses over names. Every significant figure is named, often with elaborate genealogies. The biblical narrative refuses archetypes, refuses types, refuses the generic. It insists on the particular person.
IV. Abraham: Leaving Babel’s Enforced Consensus
Genesis 11: The Tower and Its Ideology
“The whole earth had one language and one speech (safah echat u-devarim achadim)” (Genesis 11:1). The Hebrew doubles the point—not just linguistic unity but semantic unity, shared meaning.
“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (11:4).
The anxiety: Scattering means differentiation, which threatens the collective project. Better to consolidate, standardize, create one grand achievement that includes everyone under a single name.
The sin of Babel isn’t architectural ambition—the sin is enforced uniformity. “One language, one speech”—everyone must speak the same, mean the same, contribute to the same project in the same way. This is Adam I without limits—mastery pursued so single-mindedly that it obliterates Adam II’s particularity.
God’s response: “Come, let us go down and confuse their language” (11:7). Linguistic multiplication isn’t punishment—it’s correction. God forces differentiation precisely to save particularity. Multiple languages mean multiple thought-worlds, multiple ways of organizing experience.
Genesis 12: Abraham’s Departure
Immediately after Babel comes Abraham. The transition is deliberate, paradigmatic.
“The LORD said to Abram, ‘Lech lecha from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house, to the land that I will show you’” (12:1).
Lech lecha—literally “go to yourself” or “go for yourself.” A journey toward discovering who you actually are, separate from collective identity.
Abraham walks away from Babel. Not from technology or cities or human cooperation—but from Babel’s ideology, its demand that everyone conform to the one project.
God’s promise: “And I will make your name great” (12:2)—not “our name” like Babel, but your name. Individual, particular, irreplaceable.
This is the founding gesture of biblical faith: Abraham hears an address meant specifically for him, and he responds. He doesn’t have a map, a guaranteed outcome. He has a call—“lech lecha”—and his response: going, trusting, answering an address he cannot fully understand but recognizes as meant for him.
V. AI as Ultimate Adam I Technology: Choudary’s Reshuffle
The Shipping Container Revolution
Before we understand what AI does, consider a seemingly mundane innovation: the shipping container.
In 1956, a trucking entrepreneur named Malcolm McLean had a simple idea. Instead of loading cargo piece by piece onto ships (a process taking days), what if you standardized the container itself? Load the container once, move it by truck, crane it onto a ship, crane it off, load it back on a truck. The interface becomes standard; the contents can be anything.
This wasn’t just an efficiency gain—it restructured global trade. Suddenly small companies could ship internationally (no need to manage complex logistics), port cities lost their monopolies (any port with cranes could compete), labor shifted (longshoremen’s skills became obsolete; crane operators needed), and supply chains reconfigured (manufacturing could happen anywhere).
Power shifted from those who owned ships to those who controlled container standards and logistics networks—companies like Maersk that coordinated global shipping. The innovation wasn’t in moving things faster—it was in creating a new coordination system.
Sangeet Paul Choudary’s Reshuffle argues: AI is the shipping container of knowledge work.
Beyond Automation: The Coordination Thesis
Most AI discourse focuses on automation: Which jobs will AI replace? What tasks can it do? This misses AI’s real significance.
AI’s superpower isn’t automating tasks but coordinating systems—and coordination transforms everything at a deeper level than task replacement.
The key insight: AI enables coordination without consensus.
Traditionally, human collaboration required shared understanding. Everyone needed to be “on the same page”—to share frameworks, language, goals. You couldn’t coordinate effectively unless everyone understood the whole picture.
AI breaks this requirement. It can coordinate actors with different knowledge bases, priorities, and ontologies without requiring mutual understanding.
Formula 1: Coordination Without Consensus
Watch a Formula 1 pit stop. The world record is 1.82 seconds to change all four tires. Twenty crew members swarm the car. Each performs a hyper-specialized task: front jack operator lifts the car (0.2 seconds), four wheel gun operators (one per tire, working simultaneously), four tire removers, four tire carriers, rear jack operator, front and rear wing adjusters, fire extinguisher crew (ready for disaster).
Does everyone understand the aerodynamics? The engine specs? The race strategy? No. Each person knows their one task with extraordinary precision. The system works not because everyone shares the big picture but because coordination mechanisms—protocols, timing systems, algorithms—align their specialized actions perfectly.
This is AI’s paradigm. Not “replace the human” but “coordinate specialized capabilities so efficiently that the human who understands the whole becomes optional.”
The Four Tensions: How AI Reshuffles Everything
Choudary argues AI reshuffles the knowledge economy through four fundamental tensions, each driven by the same pattern: AI removes old constraints, causing existing structures to unbundle into components, which then rebundle around new logic.
Tension 1: Workers vs. Their Tools
Your grandmother’s sewing machine extended her capability—faster stitching, more consistent seams. But she remained the expert, the decision-maker, the one with know-how.
AI is different. The know-how itself migrates to the system.
Example: Radiologists once spent years learning to recognize patterns in X-rays, CT scans, MRIs. A skilled radiologist could see things others missed—subtle shadows indicating early tumors, slight asymmetries suggesting vascular problems.
Now AI trained on millions of images can spot patterns humans miss. The diagnostic expertise unbundles from the human doctor. What remains for the radiologist? Integrating findings with patient history, communicating results compassionately, making judgment calls about uncertain cases, taking final responsibility.
The radiologist’s role isn’t eliminated but transformed—from “pattern recognizer” to “coordinator of diagnostic capabilities + custodian of patient relationship + bearer of moral responsibility.”
This is Adam I achieving unprecedented mastery—but at the cost of unbundling Adam I’s competence from Adam II’s covenant.
Tension 2: Who Controls the Coordination Layer?
OpenAI builds GPT-4. Microsoft integrates it into Office. Law firms use it to draft contracts. Who has power?
Historically, tools were sold and owned. You bought a hammer; the hardware store didn’t control what you built with it. But AI capabilities are rented not owned—accessed via API, controlled by the provider, updated and changed at will.
The shipping container parallel: Power didn’t stay with ship manufacturers. It shifted to whoever controlled container standards and logistics networks—companies like Maersk that coordinated global shipping.
AI power will accumulate with whoever controls the coordination layer—not the raw capability but the system that orchestrates capabilities. Amazon Web Services doesn’t make AI models, but it provides the infrastructure that hosts them. That’s power.
Tension 3: Industries Unbundle Into Building Blocks
Consider Walmart’s quiet revolution in the 1980s. Every product got a barcode. Every checkout scanned items. Suddenly Walmart knew exactly what was selling, when, where. Their suppliers didn’t have this data.
This knowledge became power. Walmart told suppliers: “We’ll handle inventory, determine restocking schedules, even control shelf placement.” Suppliers became just-in-time manufacturers responding to Walmart’s data-driven decisions.
Walmart coordinated the entire supply chain without owning manufacturing. They won through coordination, not ownership.
AI accelerates this pattern. Every form of specialized knowledge becomes a rentable building block: Need legal analysis? Rent an AI trained on case law. Need design work? Rent image generation. Need customer service? Rent conversational AI. Need software development? Rent coding assistance.
Industries restructure around whoever can coordinate these blocks most effectively. Value shifts from “what we can do” to “what we can orchestrate.”
Tension 4: Empowered Individuals vs. Entrenched Incumbents
A single person with AI can now produce professional-quality video (coordinating editing, effects, color grading), launch a software product (coordinating backend, frontend, deployment), and run sophisticated marketing campaigns (coordinating audience analysis, content creation, A/B testing).
This should democratize—the lone creator competing with corporations. But incumbents have advantages: data, infrastructure, established coordination mechanisms, network effects.
The question: Does AI create a more egalitarian “building block economy”? Or does it concentrate power even more—giving those who already control coordination mechanisms unprecedented leverage?
Babel or Abraham? Enforced consensus or genuine plurality?
What This Means: Control Through Coordination
In the AI-reshuffled economy, power doesn’t come from owning resources but from establishing control points in coordination systems.
Example: John Deere doesn’t just sell tractors anymore. They sell tractors with sensors that collect data—soil moisture, yield rates, optimal planting patterns. They analyze this data and send “recommendations” back to farmers. Gradually, decision-making shifts from farmer to machine.
Who controls farming? Not those who own land. Those who control the coordination system—the data, the algorithms, the network of sensors and recommendations.
This is simultaneously impressive and terrifying. Impressive because it enables achievements impossible through traditional means. Terrifying because it threatens to reduce everything—including human relationships, knowledge, and creativity—to inputs in a coordination system.
The Adam I Connection
Everything Choudary describes is pure Adam I logic: mastery through system-level thinking, control through orchestration (not ownership), dignity achieved through capability at scale, success measured by coordination efficiency.
If humanity were only Adam I, this would be unambiguously good—pure augmentation, pure enhancement. But we’re not only Adam I. And AI, pursued according to Adam I’s logic alone, threatens everything Adam II needs.
VI. The Collision and the Clarification
What Adam II Requires
Covenantal man needs: to be addressed (called by name, invited into relationship that makes claims beyond efficiency), to respond particularly (answer with his unique voice, not with generic competence), to covenant (enter binding relationships that constrain future freedom), to bear witness (stand as irreplaceable particular before irreplaceable others), and to dwell in mystery (live with questions that have no algorithmic answers).
AI threatens all of this—not by malice but by logic. The coordination paradigm is fundamentally incompatible with the covenant paradigm.
But AI Also Clarifies
Here’s the paradox: AI threatens Adam II by being too good at Adam I’s work. And precisely by being too good, it reveals what Adam I’s work isn’t—what remains irreducibly covenantal, irreducibly particular.
For centuries we’ve confused the two Adams, thinking technical mastery was the fullness of human dignity. We thought: writing well = being human, solving problems = intelligence, creating art = having a soul, competent performance = personal worth.
AI reveals: Much of what we thought was Adam II (covenantal existence, personal response) was actually just Adam I (technical competence, pattern recognition, optimization).
AI can generate grammatically perfect prose in any style, diagnose diseases by pattern-matching across millions of cases, compose music following any genre’s conventions, and coordinate workflows with inhuman efficiency.
What AI cannot do: Care whether this particular project matters. Stand behind work when criticized. Make promises across unpredictable futures. Be present in grief without trying to fix. Say amen—this is what I mean, I stake myself on it.
The permanent core: What cannot be delegated, cannot be optimized, cannot be replaced—this is Adam II. And AI, by unbundling everything else, reveals this core with unprecedented clarity.
The Workshop Model: Adam I Serving Adam II
The Renaissance masters show us how coordination technology can serve particular vision. Peter Paul Rubens employed dozens of skilled assistants. He would conceive the composition, sketch the design, paint critical expressive elements—faces, hands—delegate technical execution to assistants, make final adjustments, and sign the work.
Rubens authored these paintings not by executing every brushstroke but by providing vision, making judgments, taking responsibility for the completed work.
Raphael, Leonardo, Titian—all worked this way. They understood that authorship means orchestrating capabilities to express particular vision, not insisting on unmediated manual production.
To author is to augment—to coordinate capabilities (including AI) into a vision you take ownership of.
The Impressionists confused us by insisting every brushstroke must be the artist’s own. This ideology had virtues (democratizing access, celebrating individual expression) but it made us think artistic identity lives in manual execution.
AI forces us to recover the truth: Authorship means vision, judgment, commitment, responsibility. The technical execution is Adam I’s domain. The covenantal ownership is Adam II’s.
In my Second Voice essay “Nobody Complains About CGI,” I wrote: “The Hebrew root of ‘truth’ (emet) shares space with emunah (faith) and amen (affirmation). An author is one who says ‘Amen’ to their creative output.”
VII. The Fork in the Road: Two Possible Futures
Babel Redux
Imagine AI pursued according to pure Adam I logic:
Optimize everything: Let algorithms determine style (what tests well), relationships (data-driven matching), careers (capability assessment), even worship (analytics on which music engages, which sermons retain).
Coordinate without presence: Work together without meeting, collaborate without relationship, achieve collective outcomes while remaining isolated.
Replace commitment with flexibility: Never make irrevocable choices (AI continuously finds better options), never covenant (efficiency requires option-keeping).
Smooth out particularity: Converge on algorithmically-successful patterns, become interchangeable units in coordination systems.
This is Babel rebuilt: “one language, one speech,” coordination without genuine community, efficiency without covenant, achievement without particularity. We don’t die—we become simulacra, living as if AI logic is human logic, optimizing when we should be covenanting.
The Abraham Path
Or: Use AI for Adam I’s work (coordination, technical mastery) while preserving Adam II’s calling (particular response, covenantal presence).
Like Rubens’s workshop coordinating capabilities to express his artistic vision—let AI be your coordination technology, but you provide: the question worth exploring (what matters to you), the context and judgment (your particular angle), the courage of commitment (risking yourself), the responsibility (standing behind it).
This is Abraham leaving Babel: using the tools (even Babel had impressive engineering) while rejecting the ideology. Coordinating capabilities while preserving particularity.
VIII. Practices for the Abraham Path
If we want to preserve Adam II while using Adam I’s tools, we need concrete practices:
1. Reserve Spaces for Irreplaceable Presence
Shabbat: No devices, no optimization.
Visiting the sick: Can’t be delegated. Must show up, sit with suffering, be present without fixing.
Communal prayer: Must be these people, here, now.
2. Protect Covenantal Commitments
Marriage as paradigm: Not “stay together as long as it’s optimal” but “I am bound to you even when costs arise.”
Say “I will”: Practice promising. Each promise is practice in being Adam II—bound across time, committed despite uncertainty.
IX. Conclusion: Which Adam Will AI Serve?
The Choice
AI forces Soloveitchik’s question: Can we hold the dialectic? Can we use AI for mastery while preserving space for covenant?
Babel or Abraham
AI can serve either pattern:
AI as Babel: Let algorithms determine style, optimize relationships, coordinate everyone into one system. Achieve unprecedented capability by making everyone interchangeable.
AI as Abraham: Use AI for Adam I’s work while preserving Adam II’s calling. Let AI be your workshop—but you provide vision, judgment, commitment, responsibility.
Tzelem Elohim is not generic rationality (too abstract), not creative capability (AI has that), not technical mastery (Adam I’s domain, delegable).
The divine image is irreplaceable particular style—the unique way this consciousness images God’s creativity through this embodied, historically-situated, called-by-name existence.
AI reveals this by stripping away false substitutes. By doing so much that once seemed essentially human, AI clarifies what actually is essential.
We aren’t primarily information processors (AI does this better), pattern recognizers (AI excels here), or capability coordinators (AI’s superpower).
We are primarily called by name (addressed personally), responding particularly (from our unique position), covenanting irrevocably (binding ourselves), bearing witness (standing as irreplaceable particulars), and imaging God stylistically (expressing divine creativity our way).
Marvelous! This case yields a implied mnemonic: AI can stand for Adam I, i.e., acronymically AI. And the full human, requiring both creation stories, while benefiting from leveraging AI, also needs to nurture the particularity of the individual, the relational I, Adam II, acronymically AI+I.