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An illustrative image of man and AI touching. (credit: SHUTTERSTOCK)<\/p>\nAI has revived ancient questions: What becomes of human beings when something greater than us can do, know, and judge better than we can? If machines produce abundance without labor, who should share in it? If they make knowledge instantly accessible, what becomes of learning? If they reason better than we can, what calls must remain human?<\/p>\n
The technology is new. The predicaments are not.<\/p>\n
Thousands of years before AI, Homer envisioned golden handmaidens with \u201cintelligence, speech, and strength\u201d; Aristotle imagined self-operating tools; Greek myth gave us Talos, an autonomous weapon; Talmudic scholars fabricated synthetic humans; and ancient civilizations consulted super-intelligences. Our world is not theirs. But our deepest questions are.<\/p>\n
Start with abundance. AI promises plenty on a scale the ancients could only mythologize, reviving two old dilemmas: Who is that abundance for, and what is it for?<\/p>\n
On the first question, their answer was expansive: Abundance was for everyone. In the 12th century, Maimonides predicted a future in which \u201cgoods will flow in abundance, and all the delights will be freely available as dust,\u201d where \u201clittle effort will yield great results,\u201d and there would be \u201cno famine, war, jealousy, or competition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three centuries later, Thomas More\u2019s Utopia (whence the word) envisioned \u201ca great abundance of all things,\u201d so broadly shared that \u201cno man can want or be obliged to beg.\u201d<\/p>\n
An illustrative image of man and AI touching. (credit: SHUTTERSTOCK)<\/p>\n
Yet left to market forces, AI\u2019s plenty will likely accrue to the few who own the technology, not the many whose livelihoods it disrupts. If abundance is to flow universally, we will need to design the economic plumbing to make it so.<\/p>\n
On the second question, what abundance is for, the ancients had a clear answer: Learning. The rabbis idealized Torah lishmah, study not for career or status but as an end in itself. The Greek word schole, root of \u201cschool,\u201d meant leisure, framing study as an alternative to work, not a prerequisite for it. Both traditions saw the deepest human vocation not as production but understanding.<\/p>\n
While AI<\/a> can be the consummate teacher, it also undermines some incentives to learn. We have long sold education as a route to livelihood; that calculus is looking shaky when no amount of study will make us smarter than an LLM<\/a> (large language model). Nor does easy access to information guarantee understanding.<\/p>\n In the Phaedrus, Plato warned that writing would leave people able to \u201cappear to know much while for the most part they know nothing,\u201d with \u201cthe show of wisdom without the reality.\u201d AI sharpens the danger. If we let it do our writing, reasoning, researching, and deciding, the faculties that make thinking possible may atrophy. Having access to the truth is not the same as knowing the truth.<\/p>\n So we must recover learning as an end in itself. Maimonides put the endpoint simply \u2013 study \u201cnot for money, not for honor, but because knowledge is worth pursuing for its own sake.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond learning<\/p>\n Yet much of humanity will need more than schole. Rabbi Yosei Hagalili taught that \u201ca person dies from idleness,\u201d and Rabbi Yehuda ben Bathyra taught that one without work should find \u201ca ruined courtyard or a ruined field, and go and occupy himself with it.\u201d In an age of plenty, the complement to improving our minds will be improving our world.<\/p>\n The Hebrew word mitzvah means both \u201ccommandment\u201d and \u201cgood deed.\u201d A life built around knowledge, structured time, and the turn toward others is not a consolation prize for a world without work. It is what the abundant era was supposed to make possible.<\/p>\n For the ancients, a world of plenty was largely a thought experiment. Oracles, on the other hand, were lived experiences.<\/p>\n Biblical Israel consulted the Urim and Thummim on questions of national consequence. The Greeks built a civilization around Delphi, where the Pythia settled disputes, authorized wars, and shaped policy. To their adherents, these were authoritative voices from beyond ordinary human judgment, so both faced the same problem: If the superior intelligence has spoken, what room remains for human judgment?<\/p>\n Delphi embodied one answer: Divine authority was real, if open to interpretation. Its most famous inscription was not a prophecy but a command: \u201cKnow thyself.\u201d Its deepest function was not to deliver answers but to force self-examination.<\/p>\n