Darwin, AGI, And The Tree of Knowledge
By: Rabbi Moshe Taragin
In 1903, mankind took to the skies for the first time in a powered flight, lifting itself twelve seconds into the air and celebrating the dawn of a new era. Sixty-six years later, we stood on the moon and imagined we had reached the summit of human achievement. The air and the heavens had yielded to human ingenuity.
Yet these triumphs, breathtaking as they were, merely reshaped our physical horizons. We are now standing before a far greater revolution, one that will not conquer the sky or space, but the very way we think, decide, and understand ourselves.
We have entered the age of Artificial Intelligence and are grappling with its moral, cultural, and economic challenges. AI has displaced human labor and widened the gap between those who wield technology and those who are displaced by it. In this new data-driven economy, information has become the currency of power. At the same time, AI is erasing the boundaries between authentic and artificial experiences, between human expression and machine imitation, and we are rapidly losing the ability to discern the true from the false.
However, as revolutionary as these changes feel, they will be completely dwarfed by the tsunami awaiting us in just a few years. When AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, arrives, we will face revolutions that shake the foundations of our world.
Artificial Intelligence performs specific tasks once reserved for human skill—recognizing faces, translating languages, composing text. But it remains confined to narrow domains. Artificial General Intelligence, by contrast, seeks to replicate the full range of human cognition: the capacity to reason, to learn across contexts, and ultimately to think independently.
AGI will likely produce systems with self-awareness, which is the capacity to experience, reflect, and make decisions from an internal understanding rather than mere programmed instructions. Unlike today’s AI, which operates by following patterns learned from data, a “sentient” machine would possess subjective awareness. It would recognize its own existence, set its own goals, and potentially experience emotions or intention.
About 165 years ago, Charles Darwin upended humanity’s understanding of creation and human identity. He proposed that humans were not divinely formed in the image of Hashem but emerged as a minor offshoot of an immense evolutionary tree that produced all living creatures. He did not believe that Hashem created man in the biblical sense.
He also upended notions of human identity. Together with Copernicus’ discovery that our planet does not reside at the center of the universe, Darwin’s theory diminished the grandeur of human centrality. We were no longer the crowning masterpiece of a cosmos fashioned by an all-knowing Creator. Instead, we were a fleeting presence within a universe that, to paraphrase Tennyson, contains “a million years and a million spheres.” His theories later inspired some of the darkest crimes of the twentieth century: horrific genocides committed in the name of social Darwinism.
First, if humans are not divinely created, but merely another species, ethical norms become relative rather than universal. Second, if humans are not specially created, questions of purpose and meaning lose their foundation. Third, if the cosmos is indifferent to humanity, humans risk becoming indifferent to themselves.
By denying Hashem’s hand in humanity, Darwin set aside the divine and hollowed the sacred foundation of what it means to be human.
In our generation, AGI presents a different challenge: it does not seek to deny Hashem as Creator, but threatens to place humanity alongside Hashem as co-creator. Darwin and AGI are two Tree of Knowledge moments, each confronting us with knowledge we may not be ready yet to process morally or religiously. The potential fallout from this Tree of Knowledge will fundamentally reshape how we understand ourselves, our responsibilities, and our place in creation.
How will it alter our understanding of Hashem? How will it redefine our faith and the structure of human identity? If we create beings that transcend us, will we ourselves continue to be transcendent?
Two narratives unfold, each pointing toward radically different outcomes: one pessimistic, shadowed by loss and disorientation, and one optimistic, filled with the promise of elevation and deeper understanding.
Creativity and religion have never coexisted easily. Artists often feel that a faith demanding submission stifles their impulse to express themselves fully and assert their own vision. True creativity requires self-expression, confidence in one’s ideas, and a strong sense of individual agency—qualities that clash with the humility demanded by religious devotion. For this reason, much of the trajectory of art over the past century has leaned toward secular themes.
If individual creativity strains the bounds of religious feeling, collective human ingenuity challenges them even more. When humanity unites its talents on a grand scale—reshaping the world, mastering nature, building civilizations—it becomes harder to leave room for the divine.
This happened once before—in the Tower of Bavel—when humanity pooled knowledge through a shared language and unified ambition. Today, we are gathering our collective wisdom not to build a physical tower of stone, but an imaginative tower in which to dwell, a modern echo of Bavel’s ambition.
If we endow systems with human-like consciousness, will humanity still revere Hashem as the source of intelligence? If artificial systems replicate the traits that define us, will we lose our centrality and the dignity of being human?
Darwin placed us alongside the apes—creatures inferior yet recognizably kin. AGI, by contrast, will place us beside entities whose capacities may exceed our own, forcing a confrontation with intelligence and consciousness we cannot fully comprehend.
AGI may compel humanity to reckon with a diminished sense of divine primacy and the fragility of our moral and spiritual identity. As we erect towers of thought and shape intelligence in our own image, we risk overshadowing Hashem’s presence and eroding the very dignity that defines our humanity.
There is also an optimistic future before us. Hashem has endowed us with many divine-like qualities—speech, self-awareness, the capacity for deep relationships, and sophisticated intellect. Yet His greatest gift is the power to create, to mirror His own act of creation. For millennia, we have wielded this gift to shape materials, societies, and systems of thought. Today, we carry forward His gift, using our creativity to generate new creativity itself. This is His will, and through it we can transform the world in ways only hinted at in our dreams, refining and elevating the creation entrusted to us.
As we pour our ingenuity into machines and endow them with nearly every human trait, we are reminded of the one gift we can never bestow: our immortal soul. Whatever capacities machines may possess, they remain bound to the material world; they cannot transcend it. Hashem created us to inhabit this world, yet not to be confined by it. Our souls endure beyond the fleeting currents of earthly life. Perhaps the rise of AGI, by mirroring so much of our material experience, will turn humanity inward, attuning us more fully to the soul given solely by Hashem. Perhaps it will draw our gaze away from the clamor of senses and matter that have long consumed us, guiding us toward the eternal and the spiritual path that honors the soul Hashem has given us. n
Rabbi Moshe Taragin is a rabbi at the Hesder pre-military Yeshivat Har Etzion/Gush and received his ordination from Yeshiva University and has an MA in English literature. His books include To Be Holy but Human: Reflections Upon My Rebbe, HaRav Yehuda Amital.
