When you get a text from me, how do you know I wrote it? You don't. It might have been me and it might have been my AI agent.
This week a friend sat in my office, worried. He'd been reading the headlines about AI. "Rabbi, is this the beginning of the end?" As it happens, I'd just been learning a talk of the Rebbe on this week's Torah portion, Noach, which answered his question.
The Torah describes the flood: "In the six hundredth year of Noach's life… all the wellsprings of the great deep burst open, and the windows of heaven were opened."
The Zohar reads this as a prophecy. In the six hundredth year of the sixth millennium, the windows of wisdom above and the wellsprings of wisdom below will burst open. Their purpose is to prepare the world for the seventh millennium, the era of Moshiach.
As Chassidic thought began to proliferate, the world began to change at a dizzying speed. First the railroad and the telegraph and then electricity, the telephone and radio. Later came the internet and now there's AI.
I understand why Chassidic thought prepares the world for Moshiach, however, what does the train have to do with it?
”Everything Hashem created, He created for His glory”. That includes secular knowledge! Science isn't competing with Torah; it's catching up to it.
The Rebbe once applied this to a broken air conditioner in 770. Disappointed in the building managers, he asked why did G-d create air conditioning? Clearly so that people can sit comfortably and learn Torah, and then he suggested that it needs to be fixed!
Here are a few examples.
Radio • A class given in one room travels to the ends of the earth. The waves fill the air even where nobody has tuned in. That is a small preview of Moshiach's era; when "the world will be filled with the knowledge of G-d as the waters cover the sea." Today you can stream a Torah class on your phone at any hour, from anywhere.
The video call • If a human being can see and hear someone across the globe instantly, it becomes much easier to feel what Pirkei Avos means by "an eye that sees and an ear that hears." Nothing we do is unseen.
Physics • The table and the chair look like two different things. Science tells us both are atoms and ultimately just mass and energy. The more we discover, the more the world looks like one thing. Science is slowly telling the story Chassidus has always told: Hashem is One, and all the world's variety flows from that Oneness.
Let me carry it one step further.
The Rambam writes that in the days of Moshiach "the occupation of the entire world will be only to know G-d." I used to wonder who would do the cooking, the paperwork, the inventory, or the bookkeeping?
I don't wonder anymore. More and more of that work is being done by machines, agents, robots etc. What will we do with all that free time? Learn Torah, connect with Hashem and spend quality time with each other.
So is AI dangerous? Anything powerful can be misused. People said the world was ending when the printing press arrived, and again with the factory and the internet. The danger has always been people, not the tools. Only a human being has true free choice. A machine does what it's told.
So a message you receive might be less valuable, because you don't know if it came from a human or a machine. Sitting across the table and spending time together, in person, is worth more today than it was two years ago. AI lowered the value of a message but raised the value of being present. Maybe that’s why it’s called ‘present’.
Those wellsprings, in the times of Noah, came to destroy. The wellsprings today are here to build and raise us up toward Torah and toward each other.
If technology is giving you more time, take that "extra hour" and make sure to use it by learning something with us at www.HarfordChabad.org/
Good Shabbos,
Rabbi Kushi Schusterman