500 years have passed since the Jewish folklore tales about the Golem of Prague, an anthropomorphic being created of clay and brought to life through Cabbalistic name phrases, and the contemporary man made Golem, and yet, the passage from myth to reality has changed nothing. The Golem has remained an unsolved riddle, the answer to which is encrypted in the future.
The Golem, who according to tradition was created by Judah Loew ben Bezalel (the Maharal), a 16 the century Rabbi of Prague, to defend the Jewish community from anti-Semitic pogroms, was a feeble minded person, who could become violent and turn against his creator. In fact, it is a tale about the oldest robot in history, reflecting the fear of loss of control over this anthropomorphic artificial creature.
Do we have good reasons to worry about the ultimate human-like machine we are developing, and will it very soon prove us severely mistaken? Or, in other words, is humankind on the verge of a struggle for control versus man-made machines, which are beginning to form their own independent thoughts, as described in Samuel Butler’s book, as early as 1863, "Darwin Among Machines"?
It seems that as we face the question of the future of the world and its human population, it is critical that we plan the future of the coming generations, with due care and fear and with anticipation of the catastrophes that we might bring upon ourselves. This needs to be said with due caution, in particularly regarding the present reality and in accordance with the prophetic doctrine of the architect, artist and philosopher, Yona Friedman, who stimulates us to think differently.
In an interview to the British magazine “BluePrint”, Friedman offered his own explanation to the current global crisis, amongst others stating that the situation is in fact a result of over-planning. “Planning means taking into account every event ahead of time”, he said, “except the unpredictable event. But sometimes the unpredictable occurs. It is not a result of mistaken planning. The mistake was in the actual attempt to plan something that is unplannable.”