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Steven Spielberg's new movie, A.I., is the latest in a long line of fictions about artificial human beings, reaching back to the golem legends of medieval European Jewry and the "homunculus" that the 16th- century alchemist Paracelsus claimed he had made. In one of the earliest literary appearances of this idea, a certain Rabbi Loew of Prague was supposed to have created a golem-a clay figure brought to life by magic-and used it as a household servant. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was obviously inspired by the same idea.
Whether made from clay or assembled from bits and pieces of cadavers, the central issue in these stories was always: What is the moral status of ...