Rabbinic Discourse on AI is Upside-Down (Part 2): They Took Our Jobs

[This article was made exceptionally long with the hope that nobody reads it and notices my extremely radical takes sprinkled throughout. tl;dr: you should think twice before supporting anything that actively seeks economic disruption or is likely to do so.]

In a previous essay, I talked about how (in my opinion) rabbinic engagement with Artificial Intelligence has been somewhat “upside-down,” in that the quantity of writing and speaking on different AI topics has been inversely proportional to their importance. In that essay, I mentioned four major questions about AI, though there are really several more, and I’ve been slowly addressing them elsewhere. The “four questions” were inspired by Pesach, which is approaching again, and so I think it’s time to pick this back up.

In the framework of my four questions, the first two were about mitzvot and souls: “Can AI help you fulfill commandments, especially learning Torah,” and “Does an LLM have a soul and/or will it eat yours.” After questioning the safety of our souls, I want to question the safety of our material sustenance, i.e., our jobs, in the spirit of the verse בכל נפשך ובכל מאדך.

Will the AIs take away a significant number of our jobs? And how should we even think about this? Assuming that AI won’t literally eat all the jobs, would it be a good thing to “disrupt” inefficient industries using the power of AI? If you do expect major economic effects, does that mean we should limit the resources afforded to AI companies? Does it matter if AI’s impact on the labor market is more like a normal technology, or if it creates a lot of disruption that stabilizes after a decade, or like something that humanity has never faced since biblical times?

American Jews are disproportionately employed in “knowledge work,” in precisely the sectors that are most exposed to AI disruption, such as in law, finance, education, technology, medicine, writing, and similar industries that large language models are now targeting. When we ask “will AI take our jobs?” we are to an unusual degree, asking literally about our jobs. Or at least my job, the one that required about a decade of training.

In the past, new technologies have disrupted markets, but they have also created jobs even as others disappeared. (How many people do you know who have a job title that their grandparents’ grandparents would recognize?) The question of how, and to what extent, AI will change the labor market is an empirical one. It is also one that is basically impossible to answer with confidence. There are many very smart people working on this question, and they don’t know.1 The “normal” story would be for AI to destroy lots of jobs and also create new ones. But there is good reason to think AI may not be normal in this sense: if capabilities keep growing, then by the time a human retrains for the next job, that job too may be taken over. Either way, if the experts are treating widescale economic disruption as a live possibility, it does not seem crazy to ask what that might mean from a religious perspective.

The most pressing practical question is whether Jews should actually be using AI, building it, investing in it, or speeding its adoption, given these considerations. There is also, as always, just an “attitude” question, as in how we feel about something. To tackle these issues, we first need to ask how much economic disruption matters in the first place. I think a lot of these potential market effects are not religiously neutral, but it will take a while to get there.

The most direct halakhic question one can ask about AI and jobs is this: Is there a Torah prohibition against developing or deploying a technology that you know will put people out of work?

The relevant area of halakha is often referred to as hasagas gevul, which literally means “encroachment on a boundary” but, since the Middle Ages, has also been used metaphorically to refer to a broad category of civil and monetary law dealing with unfair economic competition. The Gemara presents different views and many details that are worth exploring. The upshot of these discussions is that the Shulchan Aruch generally prohibits a rival business where another one already exists, while the Rama allows competition when the second person is offering something meaningfully different or with some advantage.

While the details and applications are complex, I want to note one important principle from the Pischei Teshuvah: even circumstances or opinions that allow for competition agree that actions that would completely destroy someone’s livelihood, “poseik chiyusei l’gamrei,” are forbidden. He quotes the Masas Binyamin, Chasam Sofer, Avnei Nezer and many others who all concur on this point (and we can probably add R. Moshe Feinstein in CM vol 1, no 38). Even where you can compete with your neighbor, you cannot put him out of a job. I am not a posek, and what I’m about to say is not halakhic advice. But I have long suspected that the moral logic of this halakha should make a religious Jew wary of working in something like management consulting, where a major part of the job is maximizing company profits by cutting labor costs, and therefore, very often, laborers.

Should we apply this to anything that would cause someone to lose their job? The logic seems to point in that direction,2 but classical poskim did not really discuss the development of technologies that would disrupt employment (except tangentially in one unusual case, discussed below). To think about how this sugya might extend beyond its original cases, we first need to notice something striking about it from a 21st-century perspective: the Gemara and medieval sources seem to have only one party’s interest explicitly in view, namely the livelihood of the business owner, who in some cases may demand a competition-free environment. None of these earlier sources explicitly raise the interests of the consumer, who might prefer free competition because it produces better goods, lower prices, or both.

Rav Osher Weiss, truly one of the most brilliant, creative, and culturally wise poskim alive today, has a series of teshuvot about technological innovation and economic displacement that assumes a lot from this talmudic silence. He agrees with the principle above, that completely destroying someone’s livelihood is forbidden by all opinions. But then he writes (I am paraphrasing his Hebrew somewhat):

“However, it appears that anything that is part of the normal course of commerce and natural economic development cannot be prevented. And there are many examples in real life: if we were asked whether it is permitted to open supermarkets because small grocers would lose their livelihood, we would not forbid it. And if we were asked whether it is permitted to manufacture automobiles because wagon-drivers and horse-riders would lose their livelihood, we would not forbid it. And if we were asked whether it is permitted to develop computers because scribes and clerks would lose their livelihood, we would not forbid it. It is clear that this halakha applies only in individual, localized cases, and not in fundamental changes to the patterns of the economy, industry, and development.”

This is, to my knowledge, the most direct and sophisticated halakhic treatment of technological disruption in relation to hasagas gevul. R. Osher Weiss goes on to argue that the prohibition on economic encroachment applies only when a person enters the same occupation as his competitor. But when someone invents something new — “mamtzi hamtza’a shona“ — and that invention happens to disrupt an industry, there is “no prohibition at all.”

I am absolutely in awe of Rav Osher Weiss, and this is one of many places where he shows extraordinary sensitivity to the complexities of modern life and to the way halakhic sources may speak to them. Still, we should notice what he is doing. He is making a very large “ukimta,” as we would call it in talmudic logic: a limitation on a talmudic rule that is not really stated in the classic sources themselves.3 What makes this move possible, I think, is precisely the gap in the Gemara I mentioned above. The sources speak about the supplier, not the purchaser. That leaves room for R. Weiss to argue that the halakha operates only in cases where limiting competition would not come at the consumers’ expense.

Perhaps, however, there is another way to understand this “missing” economic perspective. Maybe halakha is simply not very interested in market capitalism as modern people understand it. Yes, if there is no competition, there is less incentive for innovation, lower prices, and improvements in quality. But maybe that is less a bug than a feature. Life is not about market efficiency or the invention of new widgets; perhaps God wants us to focus on earning whatever livelihood is available, buying whatever products are available, and directing our other ambitions elsewhere.

This is supposed to be an essay about AI and economic disruption, so it is a little unfair of me to gesture vaguely toward the Torah’s view of free market capitalism and just say “maybe not.” I am also certainly not here to argue against one of the generation’s greatest halakhic minds based on a shrug. But this is exactly where I think Torah values may matter more than the strict letter of halakha as it has been developed until now. Can you develop technologies that lead to widescale labor-market disruption? Strictly speaking, I do not think halakha gives any member of a city the right to sue a technology, or its supplier, in a Jewish court on the grounds that it threatens the residents’ livelihoods. But when the possible consequences are communal and may affect large swaths of people, we plainly have to take those consequences into consideration. Rav Osher Weiss ends the responsum cited above with the line: “Sof davar, in the end, one must contemplate these matters with great deliberation and weigh all sides with great attentiveness of heart.”

There is one funny precedent for rabbinic attention to widescale labor disruption due to technological innovation: matzah making factories. When machines, which still required considerable manual labor, were first developed to produce matzah, there were certainly debates about whether machine-made matzah could fulfill the mitzvah. Could a machine have the proper kavana? Did the process satisfy the requirement of lishmah? Could such matzah even be considered kosher for Pesach? Important rabbis lined up on both sides. But there was also an explicit social and economic dimension to the controversy: machine matzah would put matzah bakers out of work. The polemics, in this case, were not really discussed in halakhic terminology; this was a time when rabbis and Jewish lay leaders were in the position of enacting decrees and pronouncements for the good of the Jewish community and having people follow them (for the most part). In the end, I think that this fight was won by the “pro-machine” faction. But what implications that has for AI, if any, are unclear; the matzah bakeries are still full of Jewish employees.

That brings us to the next question. All of the discussion above assumes that losing your job is self-evidently bad. But is labor itself actually a good?

The whole discussion above assumes that losing your job is bad; after all, no job means no money and therefore no food. But what if AI actually delivers some version of a jobless utopia? What if people’s material needs really can be met with much less human effort? In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030 technology would reduce the average workweek to about fifteen hours, and that the great challenge would be figuring out what to do with all the free time. We are basically at his deadline, and while his predictions about economic productivity, in 1930 terms, were not far off, people are still working quite a lot. Still, AI may finally force the question: if we no longer need to work as much, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

When God placed Adam in the Garden of Eden, the Torah says He put him there “l’avdah u’lshomrah” — “to work it and to guard it” (Bereishit 2:15). This is before the sin involving some snake and a fruit tree, and before Adam was cursed with “by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread.” According to the simple reading of the verses, there was some work to be done even in the pristine world of the Garden of Eden, and this is the understanding of Avos d’Rebi Nosson (ch. 11) and several classic commentators (such as R. Saadiah Gaon and Avraham ibn Ezra on Bereishit 2:15).

Idleness, or the state of not working, definitely seems like a bad thing in the eyes of the Torah. The Mishnah in Kesubos (5:5) rules that even if a woman brings many servants into a marriage -- so many that, in theory, she’d never needs to lift a finger, she must still do some form of work, because “ha’batala mevi’ah lidei shi’amum” — idleness leads to mental deterioration (or ‘depression’; it doesn’t seem to mean ‘boredom’ as in the modern Hebrew usage), as well as to “zima,” licentiousness. Many, many traditional rabbinic statements and modern/contemporary rabbinic authors can be found praising labor and human work, sometimes tracing back to God’s direction to Adam in Eden.4

But there is also a strong tradition to read this directive, “l’avdah u’lshomrah” as referring not to physical labor at all, but to the spiritual “work” of Torah study and mitzvot. The Targum Yonatan (Bereishit 2:15) translates it this way, as does Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer (ch. 12) and Bereshis Rabbah (16:5), with the Yalkut Shimoni (Bereishit, remez 20) emphatically stating that surely there was no physical labor needed in this perfectly blissful garden. So it’s not entirely clear that the Torah thinks there was real “work” to do in a perfect world in the conception of Chazal.

Whichever way we understand this particular verse, it is clear that part of what changed after Adam’s sin was the curse of “b’itzavon” — “in sorrow you shall eat of it all the days of your life... thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you... by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread” (Bereishit 3:17-19). The Torah certainly doesn’t present backbreaking labor as a good thing. It presents it as a punishment. This is framing of the Mishnah towards the end of Kiddushin (4:14):

R. Shimon ben Elazar says: Have you ever seen a wild animal or a bird that has a trade? Yet they sustain themselves without distress. And were they not created only to serve me, and I was created to serve my Creator — is it not logical that I should sustain myself without distress? But I have corrupted my deeds and thereby forfeited my livelihood.

In Berakhot 35b, R. Yishmael and R. Shimon bar Yochai (Rashbi) argue (or at least seem to argue) over whether or not the Torah instructs us to combine Torah study with worldly occupation, or, as R. Shimon bar Yochai/Rashbi states, “if a person plows in the plowing season and sows in the sowing season and harvests in the harvest season, what will become of Torah?” Rather, he says, when Israel does God’s will, their work is done by others. The Gemara concludes: “many did like R. Yishmael and it worked; like Rashbi and it did not work.” The practical halakha follows R. Yishmael; most people need to work. But the thrust of the conversation is that (especially for Rashbi) the ideal is a world where Jews don’t need to labor because their material needs are met through other means, freeing them entirely for Torah, because they are performing God’s will. Then their “work will be done by others,” and these need not necessarily be human others. Similarly, the Gemara (Sanhedrin 99b) expounds the verse “adam l’amal yulad,” “man was born for toil” (Iyov 5:7), and asks: what is this toiling that man was born for? Its conclusion is it man was not born to perform the labor of providing oneself with sustenance, but “amal peh,” the labor of the mouth, through the study of Torah.

Ultimately, I think all of these sources land in roughly the same place: the “work” needed to sustain a person materially is, in theory, supposed to be light enough that one’s real labor and energy can be directed toward spiritual pursuits. That was true in Eden, and it can also be true when Israel is “performing the will of the Creator.” The Rambam sharpens this point even further.

[This section basically says the exact same thing as the previous section, but through exploring the Rambam]

In the final halakhot of Hilkhot Melakhim (chapter 12), which close out his entire masterpiece of the Mishnah Torah, the Rambam describes the messianic era:

“The sages and prophets did not desire the days of the Messiah in order to rule the world, nor to subjugate the nations, nor to be exalted by them, nor to eat and drink and celebrate — but rather so that they would be free for Torah and its wisdom, without anyone oppressing or disturbing them... In that time there will be no hunger, no war, no jealousy, and no competition, for the good will be abundant and all delicacies will be as common as dust. And the whole world’s occupation will be solely to know God.”

“V’lo yihyeh esek kol ha’olam ela lada’at et Hashem bilvad.” The entire occupation of the world will be the pursuit of divine knowledge. The Sifri (Devarim, piska 317) and Gemara in Shabbat 30b paint a similar picture, teaching that in the future, the Land of Israel will produce ready-made loaves of bread and fine garments. It’s a vision of goods being produced nearly autonomously, with minimal human effort required, if any.

At the same time, the always-rationalist Rambam also “rules” (in the same chapter, halakha 1) that “al ya’aleh al ha-lev she-bimot ha-mashiach yivatel davar mi-minhago shel olam” - the messianic era will not involve any suspension of the natural order, any changes to the physical laws of nature. The world will proceed “k’minhago” — according to its usual course. Interestingly, without something like technological automation, it seems hard to reconcile this with the idea that everyone will have the sole occupation of “knowing God,” but advancements in AI and robotics make this at least conceivable.

It is worth unpacking what the Rambam actually means here, because he is not describing a fantasy or a miracle. In his Introduction to Perek Chelek (his commentary on the Mishnah in Sanhedrin, ch. 10), he explicitly discusses the Gemara in Shabbat 30b about the Land of Israel producing “ready-made loaves and fine garments,” and he reads it allegorically. “In those days,” he writes, “livelihood will be very easy for people, so that when a person does some small amount of work, he will gain great benefit.” This, he says, is the meaning of the image of ready-made loaves and garments. It is a figure of speech for abundance, not a prediction about magical agriculture. That fits his insistence, in Hilkhot Melakhim, that the natural order will not be suspended. Work does not literally disappear; it simply becomes light enough that it no longer dominates a person’s day.

Rambam does not think that material abundance and lightened labor are good for their own sake; like the passages from Chazal cited above, he too has harsh words to say about leisure and wasting time. So what is abundance good for? In Hilkhot Teshuvah (8:7), Rambam notes that all the physical blessings promised by the Torah and the prophets — wealth, peace, comfort — belong to the messianic era, not to the World to Come, which is the true place of spiritual reward. Prosperity is not the reward itself; it is the conditions that make the real reward possible. He spells out the logic in Hilkhot Teshuvah 9:1: God promised that if we fulfill the Torah with joy, He will remove the obstacles that prevent us from doing so, “so that we won’t spend all our days on the things the body needs, but will sit free to study wisdom and perform the commandments, in order to merit the World to Come.” When a person is too busy with work, he simply cannot engage deeply in wisdom or mitzvot. The whole purpose of material ease is to free us for something else.

This may not just be a messianic dream. The Rambam seems to think that this redirection of human energy is something we should strive for now, to whatever extent we can. In Hilkhot Teshuvah 10:6, he writes that the love of God cannot take root in a person’s heart unless “he is constantly engaged in it as is fitting, and abandons everything else in the world besides it... Therefore a person must devote himself to understanding the wisdoms and insights that make known his Creator, according to his capacity to understand and grasp.” The path to that knowledge is described in Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah (2:1): “When a person contemplates God’s works and His great and wondrous creations, and sees in them a wisdom that has no measure or end, he immediately loves and praises and glorifies, and has a great desire to know the great Name... And when he thinks about these very things, he immediately recoils and fears, and knows that he is a small, lowly, dark creature, standing with meager understanding before the One who is perfect in knowledge.” The Rambam’s ideal, in other words, is not rest and relaxation. It is da’at Hashem, knowledge of God, which he understands (in his commentary on Chagigah 2:1) as something close to what we might call natural philosophy, metaphysics, and theology — “discourse on the totality of existence and the existence of the Creator and His knowledge.”

This is what the Rambam means when he concludes Hilkhot Melakhim by saying that in the messianic era, people “will be great sages who know hidden, deep things, and will grasp the knowledge of their Creator according to human capacity” in fulfillment of the verse, “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea” (Yeshayahu 11:9). The entire book of the Mishneh Torah begins with the commandment to know God (Yesodei HaTorah 1:1) and ends with the promise that, in the messianic era, everyone finally will. The arc of history bends toward a world where human beings can do what they were created to do — to think — and material abundance is just the infrastructure that makes it possible.

There are other indications that the Rambam does not think you have to wait for the messianic era to live this way. We spoke about the beginning and the end of his Mishnah Torah, but consider also what is in its exact center (the conclusion of the seventh of fourteen books). At the very end of Hilkhot Shemitah v’Yovel (13:13), after discussing the special status of the tribe of Levi, who receive no portion of the Land of Israel so that they can be dedicated to service of God, the Rambam makes a remarkable extension:

“Not only the tribe of Levi, but every single person from among all the inhabitants of the world whose spirit moves him and whose understanding gives him the insight to set himself apart to stand before God, to serve Him, and to know Him — who walks uprightly as God made him, and removes from his neck the yoke of the many calculations that people seek — behold, this person has become sanctified as the holy of holies, and God will be his portion and his inheritance forever, and God will provide for him in this world that which is sufficient for him, just as He provided for the kohanim and the levi’im.”

This is an extraordinary passage, and it has troubled commentators for centuries, because the Rambam is famously and forcefully opposed to taking money for Torah learning. In Hilkhot Talmud Torah (3:10), he writes that anyone who decides to study Torah and not work, relying on charity, has “desecrated God’s name, disgraced the Torah, extinguished the light of religion, brought evil upon himself, and removed his life from the World to Come.” I don’t even know what that means (extinguish the light of religion?), but it sure sounds bad. This passage in Shemitah v’Yovel is talking about “every person from among all the inhabitants of the world” and not specifically Jews who study Torah, and so it must be describing a different kind of person and a different kind of pursuit: someone who has dedicated the labor that would otherwise go toward a livelihood to pursuing the knowledge of God. Such a person is not looking for charity or handouts or to be paid for their “studies”; they simply make do and trust that God will provide for them.

For our purposes, the important point is that the Rambam clearly believes this kind of life is possible now, not only in the days of mashiach. The messianic era makes it universal and easy, but in principle anyone whose “spirit moves them” can already live this way. If technology such as AI can make that transition easier, then presumably the Rambam would see that as a good thing, if we are up to the challenge of using our freed-up time wisely.

Of all people, a secular guru who is a favorite of Silicon Valley, Yuval Noah Harari, makes this connection between machine advancements, labor, and the kollel lifestyle of studying Torah without working. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes:

“As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, the ultra-Orthodox Jews may come to be seen as the model for the future rather than as a fossil from the past. Not that everyone will become Orthodox Jews and go to yeshivas to study the Talmud. But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job. If we manage to combine a universal economic safety net with strong communities and meaningful pursuits, losing our jobs to algorithms might actually turn out to be a blessing.”

Thus far the more utopian picture, which assumes that AI will be a very different type of technology than past ones and usher in a time where everyone has to work much less. But we should also consider the more “ordinary” possibility. I obviously have no idea whether AI will take our jobs and/or cause major disruptions to the labor market, but let’s assume that while AI will not produce permanently less employment, it does increase churn. Some jobs disappear, others appear, industries get reorganized, and the economists reassure us that in the long run everything balances out. Even that scenario, though, is not necessarily a good one from a Torah perspective.

One of the oddities of modern capitalist culture is that “disruption” is almost always treated as a compliment. If a founder says he wants to “disrupt” an industry, this is supposed to sound bold and visionary rather than vaguely barbaric. If “disruption” means that a large number of people lose stable livelihoods, have to retrain in midlife, move cities, take pay cuts, or simply fall through the cracks while investors congratulate themselves for increasing efficiency, I find myself confused as to why this is a good thing.

A father is obligated to teach his son an umanut, a trade (Kiddushin 29a-30b), and the Gemara expands upon this rule in the Mishnah to discuss the pros and cons of various career options. I’ll get to that below, but it is first worth noting that Chazal assume economic life to be much more stable, at least from the perspective of career training. I think a more interesting source is R. Yochanan’s statement that “a person should not change his own trade or deviate from the trade of his ancestors” (Arakhin 16b). I don’t think anyone ever looked at this Gemara and thought that it implied a binding halakhic rule that one must engage in the same career as their father. Plenty of rabbis, for obvious reasons, did not follow that advice. But it does reveal that Chazal seem to prefer a world in which people do not have to switch careers every few years, and would not approve of ushering in sweeping changes to the economic structure that would require such a thing. I’ll admit, I’m speaking here as someone who is currently trying to make a career change and finding it very hard on my religious/personal life, so I’m more than a bit biased. But if it is true that “AI will create at least as many jobs as it destroys,” that is not religiously neutral even if it is economically neutral.

It is already the case that much of the modern economy prizes endless flexibility and repeated reinvention -- and I think that this is moderately hostile to anyone trying to live a life in which career aspirations are secondary to relationships with God, family, and community. Even if AI only increases churn rather than causing permanent unemployment, a Jew should be slow to celebrate that. If you are building or deploying tools whose main selling point is that they change what kinds of jobs are economically valuable, I think you should first meditate on what that means. “Move fast and retrain people” may be almost as foreign to Jewish values as the more destructive version of that slogan.

But critique of disruption still leaves a more personal question unanswered: what kind of work should a Jew actually want to do? Being an Orthodox Jew in America is very expensive. There is kosher food; the need to live within walking distance of at least one shul, which is reflected in the real estate market; private schools and summer camps; and roughly ~20 extra days off per year for holidays. These realities put major constraints on what kinds of employment Orthodox Jews can even consider, and so it is no wonder there is very little talk about the morality of those jobs from a Jewish perspective. I’m sure any rabbi would agree you probably should not take up a position as chief arms dealer for ISIS, but barring that, I think most Jews simply do not take moral factors into consideration.

But the fact is that different jobs really do have different impacts upon the world. Mostly, we hope, they are net positive. The Gemara (Shabbat 33b) discusses what our forefather Yaakov did for Shechem, “vayichan et pnei ha’ir,” “he graced the face of the city” (Bereishit 33:18) — Rav says he established a currency for them; Shmuel says he established markets; R. Yochanan says he established bathhouses. Yaakov didn’t open a yeshiva (or a kiruv hotel, like perhaps his grandfather did). He looked to provide something material for the city, whether it was functional economic infrastructure or some other public good. Here is a model here for what it means to work in the world as a religious person: you are supposed to be useful.

As I said, there is not much public discussion around the moral/religious consideration of career choices in Orthodox Judaism, but one important exception is R. Aharon Lichtenstein. In By His Light he has a few passages on how a religious person should think about choosing a career:

Is a person really driven to some career because he thinks that it is necessary and important for society? Does he feel that he has a personal contribution to make? ...it is important that a person feel that what he is doing is necessary from the social and collective point of view. This should be a major factor in a person’s career choice. Then, after choosing a career, he must ask himself whether he is giving it his maximal effort. Regardless of what he is doing, he must work with the sense of being an oved Hashem — “be-khol derakhekha da’ehu.

Recently I was happy to hear that Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz, the head of Yeshiva University’s semikha program, said something very similar a few months ago, but he also noted the irony of talking about jobs when he’s only ever been in the rabbinate. Rabbi Lebowitz has also been stirring things up lately by talking about gambling and the use of betting markets. I intend, hopefully, to write a separate article about this in the near future, but in Jewish sources, the question of gambling is directly related to career choice. Quoting the Mishnah/Gemara, the Rambam writes that habitual gamblers are disqualified as witnesses because they are not engaged in “yishuvo shel olam,” the building or settling of the world (Hilkhot Edut 10:4). In his commentary to the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 3:3), Rambam writes:

“This [gambling] is forbidden because one engages in an occupation that has no benefit for the sustaining of the world. It is a foundational principle in our Torah that a person ought not occupy oneself in this world except with one of two things: either with wisdom, to perfect oneself through it, or with an occupation that contributes to the maintenance of the world, such as a craft or commerce.”

It is not always obvious whether a given occupation is beneficial for sustaining the world. But it seems to me that the general thrust of the Torah’s economic laws, and of many rabbinic statements about careers, is that the Torah’s overall “preference,” so to speak, is for a person to be closer to the production of real goods and services and farther from various forms of rent-seeking or “passive income.”

There is a rather understatedly shocking passage in R. Eliyahu Dessler’s Michtav Me-Eliyahu, which many people seem not to notice despite its appearing in one of the book’s more popular sections. R. Dessler cites the rabbinic statement that “great is the person who benefits from the labor of his own hands” (Berakhot 8a). I think most people read that as praise for any honest labor; the Gemara is just saying that it is better to sustain yourself than rely on handouts. But if you look closely at how R. Dessler reads the line, it becomes clear that he understands the rabbis to be speaking literally, and specifically, about manual labor:

ואמרו חז״ל גדול הנהנה מיגיע כפיו יותר מירא שמים (ברכות ח׳), במה היא מעלת הנהנה מיגיע כפיו? הוא האדם המעולה, אשר יחפוץ ויתאוה שתהיה נתינתו יתרה על נטילתו. האיש הזה, בהשתמרו שלא יכשל, לא יתפרנס מפרי מעלות שכלו ונפשו בחכמה או באומנות, שבכל אלה אפשר שיקבל יותר על ערך שויון נתינתו, ויבחר לעבוד ביגיע כפיו ובזיעת אפיו. המלאכה הפשוטה, המשתלמת בקוטן התשלומין, וערך יגיעתו אשר יתן בה, ודאי מרובה היא על תשלומיה (מכתב מאליהו חלק א’ עמ’ לה)

“And the Sages said: Greater is one who benefits from the labor of his hands than one who fears Heaven (Berakhot 8). In what does the superiority of one who lives from the labor of his hands consist? He is the most excellent of men — one who desires and yearns that his giving should exceed his taking. This man, taking care not to fail in this, does not earn his livelihood from the fruits of his intellectual and spiritual gifts, whether in scholarship or in skilled craft, for in all of these it is possible that he receives more than the equivalent of what he gives. Instead, he chooses to work through manual labor and the sweat of his brow. Simple work, compensated as it is with meager wages, is such that the value of the effort he puts into it almost certainly exceeds its payment.”

There is a surprisingly Marxist assumption lurking behind R. Dessler’s statement, which is that getting paid for intellectual labor is potentially “cheating” in some way, because it does not produce true value, or may be highly overvalued. Even if most people don’t think this way (and certainly do not read Chazal as expressing this opinion), I think the direction of the thought is still highly instructive. The ideal Jew, in Rav Dessler’s framing, is not looking for clever ways to extract maximum return from a system. He or she wants their net effect on the world to be one of contribution in a way that is materially evident, and the closer one can be to the physical manifestations of the product, the better. Ideally, a person should be making money by doing things, not by passively positioning himself to capture returns while others do the underlying work.

The first half and second half of this essay point in opposite directions. The first half says, more or less, that the ideal is a world in which material production becomes so easy that human beings can redirect themselves toward Torah, wisdom, mitzvot, contemplation, and perhaps even just speech, or ‘amal peh. The second half says that there is something spiritually healthy about concrete physical labor as a source of income, especially the kind where it is obvious that you are doing something useful in the world with your own hands. Which is it?

I think the answer is that the Torah is not committed either to labor or leisure as such. The curse of Adam is that obtaining bread becomes painful and exhausting, and if we can make it less so, we should. There is no contradiction between wanting less cursed toil and still thinking that a human being ought to be engaged in some form of avodah. If a machine can take over drudgery forms of labor that are deadening, dangerous, or just plain dumb, then people could, in theory, become freer to learn, to pray, to raise children, and to think. This starts to look a little bit like the Rambam’s vision of livelihood becoming so easy that people can be available for da’at Hashem. In the passage quoted above from Rambam’s Mishnah commentary regarding gambling, where he says that people should occupy themselves only with wisdom or maintaining the world, he ends off by saying that the ideal is to maximize the former. Obviously this is nothing like the modern idea of ‘leisure’; when “labor is done by others,” as in R Shimon bar Yochai’s phrase, it is so that the Jew can toil in Torah. If the land can one day “produce ready-made loaves and fine garments” by way of data centers and robots, that can be a good thing, if the benefits are used wisely and distributed widely.

This first “if” is a big one, but so is the second “if.” Our society is not currently arranged in a way that takes labor-saving gains and converts them into Torah, wisdom, or even ordinary human flourishing. Usually it converts them into either more work that is increasingly disassociated from the end-product, or into shareholder value. The people currently making the biggest fortunes from AI are, for the most part, not the people doing the labeling, moderating, cleaning, maintaining, mining, or even the software engineering. Nor are they usually the writers, artists, teachers, programmers, and others whose intellectual labor has been vacuumed up into training data and turned into a privately owned machine for generating returns. Maybe there will be a period in which manual labor actually becomes more valuable. If the bots are still clumsy while the AI systems are increasingly capable of white-collar work, then perhaps the plumber, the electrician, the home health aide, etc. will for a time be more economically secure than the accountant, lawyer, or graphic designer. But who knows! And even if that happens, this kind of economic reshuffling and uncertainty is also not conducive to religious and spiritual growth.

We want to work towards a world where technology makes life easier, and where everyone has more time to spend on spiritual matters. Unfortunately, to invest in AI development, under present conditions, is structured to do the opposite. It looks to reward precisely the kind of rent-seeking economy that Torah instincts should make us suspicious of: ownership capturing the gains from the labor of other people while those same people become less financially secure. If we are interested in the messianic-type world described by the Rambam, we should be doing what we can to make sure that the benefits of technology are shared appropriately so that everyone can work less.

What this means practically is hard to say. Broadly speaking, I think we should not celebrate disruption merely because it is exciting, we should not confuse higher GDP with human flourishing, and we should prefer work and technological advancement that is genuinely useful. I also think a Jew should think twice before engaging in careers or investing in enterprises whose entire attraction is that they profit by reducing the need for human labor. But the most important question is still: what does this actually do for God’s world? AI really might end up being good for civilization, but getting there may require more thoughtful engineering of the technology itself, more equitable social architecture, wiser adoption strategies, and possibly more political involvement and government regulation. The goal should be for technology to help everyone work less at mere survival, so that we have more room to think, love, and seek God -- to do the things that make life worth living.

This is still just one issue of so many. I hope, b’ezrat Hashem, to have another essay or two about technology generally, and then finally turn to the most important question: Is there a significant possibility that AI will destroy humanity or otherwise precipitate catastrophic societal collapse? And if there is even a small chance of such an outcome, what would the Torah say about how we should respond?