The Spiritual Windfall of AI

The twentieth century was not particularly kind to blue-collar workers—or God. The Industrial Revolution and the stock we place in science devalued both the manual laborer and his old-fashioned belief in God. With the damage largely done—religious attendance declining, blue-collar employment at historic lows—technology is now turning its gaze toward the lawyers and accountants.  

Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), promises to automate aspects of white-collar work once thought immune to mechanization. That shift offers an opportunity—not merely economic but spiritual. If machines can draft briefs and conduct audits, we are forced to ask a deeper question: What is work for?

In the 1970s, a Hasidic rabbi named Shlomo Chaim Kesselman made a prediction: Just as technology had made the coachman and washerwoman obsolete, soon “they will invent a machine that will be a great scholar.” When that day comes, Rabbi Kesselman writes, “everyone will understand that even study itself, if it is not out of true fear of Heaven and cleaving to the Holy One . . . is not the ultimate purpose of the soul’s descent to this world.”

If Rabbi Kesselman anticipated the machine-scholar, Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (the “Genius of Vilna”) anticipated the temptation behind it in the eighteenth century. There is a tradition that the influential rabbi refused supernatural shortcuts to knowledge—declining angels who wished to teach him—because there are no shortcuts to a religious life. The spiritual struggle itself is the point; our free will is what separates us from animals, angels, and AI.

Artificial intelligence cannot replace the religious obligations that billions regard as central to their lives. The Ten Commandments require us to observe the Sabbath and honor our parents. While technology can help, hinder, or distract from these duties, it cannot discharge them. If writing legal briefs and conducting audits become automated, it will be worth remembering that while man is born to toil, the rabbis explain that this refers to spiritual toil.

In the Sinai desert, the Israelites were told that God “subjected you to hunger and then gave you manna . . . in order to teach you that man does not live on bread alone.” The lesson was not only about sustenance but about purpose: Work is not an end in itself. Even if manna falls from heaven and the need to file 1040s goes away, there is still spiritual work that needs to be done.

Modern industrial society rests in part on the Protestant work ethic, but also, as the economic historian Emil Kauder observed, on the moral philosophy of late Spanish scholastics who understood the importance of leisure to proto-capitalist societies.  

Labor is a means. The end of economic organization is satisfying consumer wants through efficient capital allocation. If those demands can be satisfied through less labor (and more capital), so much the better. In the 1950s, Al Capp created a famous cartoon creature called the Shmoo, which would produce anything for humans the instant they wanted it. It was hunted down because it was “bad for business,” but it is clear that the Shmoo would be good for society, regardless of how bad it was for the bottom line. Imagine how horrible it would be to have all your needs met, all your food grown, all your diseases cured, and all your wars stopped instantaneously and for free—how horrible that would be for the nonfarm payroll number!

Skeptics will note that predictions of technological displacement are older than the nineteenth-century Luddites. Human creativity always finds new jobs to create and new paperwork to generate. But this moment feels different because this new technology replicates an aspect of work that is distinctly human: the ability to use language. And for those who are unimpressed after trying ChatGPT or Claude a few times, try using the latest paid models to do whatever task most consumes your work hours. It’s shocking what it can do.

There is also a religious dimension to technological optimism. Some traditions describe the messianic era not as an age of open miracles but as one of technological and political progress where hunger, disease, and war become a thing of the past. That aspiration has often gone badly astray; dangerous utopian ideologues like Marx (inspired by religious Millennialist movements) have attempted to “immanentize the eschaton,” as Eric Voegelin puts it—to use force to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. But just because we shouldn’t try to hasten the messiah doesn’t mean we can’t eagerly wait for him. Indeed, most Abrahamic faiths view it as a religious imperative. While AI may not ultimately usher in a post-scarcity world, artificial intelligence combined with more automation is the technology in modern times that is most concordant with the traditional view of the messianic era.

Now’s the time to get right with God. Unshackled from the demands of work, people are forced to think about meaning (or, unfortunately, shirk from this responsibility into hedonism). A society that can outsource more of its productive labor will either relearn the older uses of freedom—prayer, study, family, obligation—or anesthetize itself with amusements. Either way, the alibi is disappearing. The world is changing, and we may be closer to the end than the beginning—closer to the moment when we’re asked to give account.