Shabbat in the Age of AI

What we do on Shabbat—light candles, eat challah, drink wine, pray, etc—stays relatively consistent throughout the generations. 

What we don’t do on Shabbat, however, is in constant flux as different technologies, labors, and tools rise and fall throughout history. 

Thus, in an age dominated by internet access mediated by screens, Shabbat becomes a time of digital disconnect, and the halacha prohibiting the use of electronics becomes the most salient negative commandment of the day. In another age, when agricultural labor dominated the Jewish work week, the prohibitions on harvesting or carrying would have felt equally salient. 

Today we stand on the cusp of a technological revolution. AI, we are told, will change our society in unpredictable and potentially frightening ways. Engaging with AI will soon come to dominate our work weeks, and so it stands to reason that not engaging with it will come to characterize our Shabbats.

What will this look like? The most extreme voices say that AI will prove fatal for mankind. Eliezer Yudkowsky, the main proponent of this doomsday prophecy, explains how he thinks it will go down: “A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long,” he writes in a piece for TIME. “In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms….”

If Yudkowsky is correct, Shabbat in the age of AI will be a day when we cower together in our homes whispering blessings in the hope that the 3D-printed AI beings don’t hear us. 

Frightening, but unlikely. Despite what Yudkowsky says, the technology to “print” battle-ready living beings doesn’t actually exist, and even if it did, one could always unplug the printer.

Less extreme than Yudkowsky are those who say that bad actors will use AI to flood the internet with fake images and fake news stories, leading to cultural polarization and disintegration. A fake news crisis is nothing we haven’t seen before, but AI could scale up the problem to an unimaginable degree.

In this disruptive new world, Shabbat would present an opportunity to emerge from an ocean of doubt onto a small island of certainty—a day on which we can again trust our senses.

In this disruptive new world, Shabbat would present an opportunity to emerge from an ocean of doubt onto a small island of certainty—a day on which we can again trust our senses.

A third prediction is that AI will lead to mass joblessness. This, sadly, has already begun happening in certain industries. If human workers are made redundant in large numbers by AI, we won’t just have an economic/political crisis on our hands, but a spiritual one as well. Without work, we will find ourselves depressed and despondent in a world where we have become nothing but consumers.

On one day each week, at the very least, we will remember that our ultimate value is not in doing, which has been taken from us, but in being—which can never be taken from us.

In this case, Shabbat will be a day of relief for a human race made obsolete by its own handiwork. On one day each week, at the very least, we will remember that our ultimate value is not in doing, which has been taken from us, but in being—which can never be taken from us.

These are all concerning visions for the future, but what about the best-case scenario? In the optimal version of the story, AI doesn’t steal our work, but rather liberates us from work. Freed at last from the curse of having to toil for our bread, we will lead lives of dignified leisure. 

I tend to doubt visions of utopia, but it is worth considering what Shabbat, which is called a taste of the world to come, would feel like under utopic conditions.

Perhaps Shabbat would lose all meaning. In a world where all hard labor is done by AI, Shabbat might feel redundant. We might even witness an inversion in which life has become so easy that Shabbat feels like toil by comparison. 

I would like to believe, however, that Shabbat will always be meaningful. What dominates us for six days a week cannot dominate us on the seventh. While times and technologies change, this fact will remain. 

Shabbat will be the day we rely solely on human intelligence and converse only with beings made of flesh and blood. It will thus be what the Torah always promised—a remembrance of creation—a time to celebrate our createdness, our humanity, and the non-artificial intelligence Who brought us into being.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020).