Rabbi Loew’s golem reminds us of the hubris we invite when attempting to fashion intelligent, sentient creatures – creatures in the image of ourselves, or from the mind of God. It rarely goes well. From the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Ava in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, by way of Karel Čapek’s eponymous robots, James Cameron’s Terminator, Ridley Scott’s replicants in Blade Runner, and Stanley Kubrick’s HAL, these creations almost always turn on their creators, leaving in their wake trails of destruction, melancholy, and philosophical confusion.
