Strong AI, Weak AI, and Talmudic AI

Yale Computer scientist David Gelernter argues here that Judaic dialectic tradition will help us to reason our way through the moral morass of the first truly intelligent machine. I had first written this off as an article in the genre of "interesting collision of worldviews". But in the near future the cognitive science debates we're having today will seem luxuriously academic and unhurried, because for several reasons involving computing and neuroscience they will soon be more than intriguingly difficult questions. Even if we can all agree that suffering must be the basis of morality, we will need a way to know that, on that basis, it's not okay to disassemble someone in a coma, but it is okay to disassemble a machine that can argue for its own self-preservation.