So I have been on a huge golem kick for years now and I have been reflecting on why. Lord are they relevant to the present
If you're not familiar, they are a human shaped creature made from clay and animated through language. Sounds like programming a robot huh. Well yeah, it basically is, and if you do it wrong or try to get the golem to do things it was not designed for, it goes haywire.
There's two things here that resonate with me a lot. First, to make something like us (as in a person), it takes magic to do it. I'm not that kind of AI researcher, I do everything symbolically (just like the Kabbalah's description of how to make a golem as it were). But I don't pretend to make human things or even human like things. I just make characters.
The current hotness of ML and language models and image models is far closer to magic than what I do. We don't know exactly why anything works or even really how to control it. These tools are also pretty goddamn far from ourselves (and everyone hyping up General Intelligence is a fraud). A lot of this has to do with us, people still being magical beings. We don't know how or why we function the way that we do, so it's impossible to replicate ourselves perfectly.
And this brings me to my second, related but disparate point. Golems will go crazy when they are pulled away from their intended purpose. Is that not what having dysphoria is? I'm a trans girl and sure as hell was going crazy while not being allowed to be myself. Everyone who wants us gone, especially the polite ones who just don't want is in their face, is trying, knowingly or not (but usually knowingly), telling us they would prefer us to go crazy. But hey, the part of the golem story where that happens, the golem attacks the people breaking it too.
So yeah, some tangents in there but golems are cool, golems are programming, and golems are even maybe a little inspirational to me as a trans person