Technology

The Chassidic image of the wellsprings spreading outward is a claim about distribution, and distribution has a technology at every point in history — the printing press, the postal system, the recording, the network. Each expanded reach and none changed the content.

That is the first thing worth saying about technology and it is deliberately unexciting. A tool amplifies intention. It does not supply intention, and it does not improve the intention it amplifies.

Nothing is holy by default

There is a persistent temptation to read new capability as spiritual progress — instantaneous global communication described as a step toward unity, vast information access as a step toward knowledge.

The chapter on daas has already spoiled that argument. Information is not knowledge in the sense that matters, and a network that distributes information perfectly has not distributed daas at all. It is entirely possible for a civilisation to become more connected and less capable of attention, which is roughly what has happened.

The specific case of artificial intelligence

Systems that produce language change the economics of text, which matters for a tradition whose transmission is textual. Two consequences follow from what has already been established, and both are cautions rather than prohibitions.

First, transmission in this tradition has always been personal — text plus teacher, and the teacher is not redundant infrastructure. A system that supplies text without the relationship supplies half of a mechanism.

Second, fluency is not authority. The chapter on judgement beyond surfaces is directly relevant: a system optimised for producing convincing sentences is optimised for exactly the property Yeshayahu 11:3 disqualifies. The disciplines that check a claim against a source, and that distinguish a source from a synthesis, become more load-bearing rather than less.

The verse describes a filled earth, not a well-connected one. Networks move information at the speed of light and daas at no speed at all.