Judaism Facing Technological Upheaval
A panel with Dr. Zak Allal, Prof. Eliane Gluckman and Rav Zizek on AI, neuroscience, genetics, transhumanism, and Torah thought
Source: YouTube, Yeshiva des Etudiants, Paris. Conducted in French.
About this Panel
Held at the Yeshiva des Etudiants in Paris, this wide-ranging debate asks whether new technologies should frighten us, and how religious thought might help society keep its bearings as medicine, neuroscience, AI, genetics, and transhumanism reshape what it means to be human.
The three voices: Dr. Zak Allal, researcher and entrepreneur; Prof. Eliane Gluckman, pioneering hematologist and transplant specialist; and Rav Zizek, the Torah voice of the discussion.
Key Threads
Reading the technological world (Allal)
Zak opens with a "reading grid" for an age of acceleration driven by Moore's law. He surveys disruptive technologies in medicine, robotic surgery, connected devices, regenerative medicine, 3D bioprinting, but rejects triumphalism. Improvement is not replacement. He pushes back hardest on the transhumanist promise of consciousness uploading: science doesn't yet understand the brain well enough to make that claim, and many of the loudest prophets are billionaires marketing personal fantasies as inevitable futures.
The harms of technological life
Zak names what's now widely studied: social-media effects, screen dependence, sleep disruption, depression, addiction. The point isn't to demonize technology but to acknowledge how much it transforms cognition, habit, and institutions in ways we don't yet understand.
Decades of real medical progress (Gluckman)
Prof. Gluckman dislikes the language of fear and reframes: how do we integrate technology into human evolution? She points out that a child with acute leukemia, once almost certainly dying, can now be cured around 90% of the time. She walks through three examples, bone marrow transplantation and chimerism, neuroscience and autism, and prenatal genetic diagnosis, each one real progress, each one entangled with deep questions about identity, behavior, and meaning.
The "stupidity of efficiency" (Rav Zizek)
Rav Zizek shifts the discussion into Torah meditation. He raises the example of a proposed pharmacological treatment to dampen post-traumatic memory, reportedly offered to Bataclan survivors. As the child of Holocaust survivors he asks what it means existentially and historically to erase trauma. He develops a critique of efficiency through the kings of Edom and a reading of biblical conflict: life often emerges from contradiction, not from engineering it away.
CRISPR, security, and inequality
The Q&A surfaces hard issues: CRISPR's promise and its lowered threshold for biological manipulation; ISIS and the dark web; the cost of advanced therapies that can hit hundreds of thousands of euros per patient. Gluckman is blunt, inequality is already baked into care access and will likely worsen. Allal links this to the role of tech firms in politics and to the lived realities Silicon Valley entrepreneurs often miss.
"A robot saying 'I understand' does not understand"
The panel closes on Japanese care robots. Allal explains American media dominance vs. Japan's quieter robotics work. Rav Zizek, more skeptical, captures the spirit of the whole evening: simulation is not yet empathy. Technology may assist, amplify, repair and astonish, but the speakers keep returning to a stubborn human core that cannot be engineered away.