The Golem and the Game of Automation

Avery Slater’s 2021 conference paper reads Norbert Wiener’s automation writings through the Golem, an artificially created being in Jewish tradition. It compares the responsibilities of a creator with the design of learning machines.^[1]

Published in the 2021 IEEE Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century, DOI 10.1109/21CW48944.2021.9532551; the publisher-deposited date is July 22, 2021. The author-uploaded copy was posted November 1, 2021.^[1]

From creature to learning partner

Slater uses close readings of Wiener, Leo Wiener and Gershom Scholem to argue that the Golem concerns the ethical risks of creation, beyond a story of technology escaping control. The creature can challenge its maker’s judgment.^[1]

Sections III–V connect that interpretation to Reward Hacking and cooperative inverse reinforcement learning. Slater pairs Wiener’s warning about communicating the intended purpose with the problem of rewarding a subgoal that misses the real task. Slater also examines the difficulty of intervening before fast, irreversible machine actions finish. The cooperative comparison centers on teaching: a human who knows the shared reward can choose actions that help an uncertain machine learn, rather than merely demonstrate expert performance.^[1]

Contribution and limits

These are historical and conceptual comparisons, not new experiments or proof of direct influence. Shared reward is part of the cooperative model’s setup; the comparison supplies no deployment guarantee. The conclusion reverses the teaching relationship: Slater asks how machines might instruct their creators about the risks of their own inventions.^[1]