"Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." (Daniel 12:4)
Shefa is a Hebrew word I grew up with in synagogue, long before I thought about what it meant.
Between prayers, I would walk around collecting candy, competing with the other kids for the last few pieces. My pockets were already so full that candy would fall behind me as I walked.
At home, I was lucky to get a few pieces before my older siblings finished everything. But in synagogue, there was always shefa. People gave candy by the handful, with a delighted smile. And when God gives, blessings pour like rain.
As an adult, intelligence feels like that candy. It is a gift from God. And its abundance is a true blessing.
That word came back to me while reading two very different essays about where AI is going.
Sam Altman's essay on the next decade, "The Intelligence Age," keeps landing on one word: abundant. Dario Amodei's "Machines of Loving Grace" runs fifty pages longer and arrives at the same place. Intelligence, once it gets cheap and close enough, reaches the parts of a life that used to be rationed by cost, geography, or who you happened to know.
Altman writes about driving the cost of compute down until it's genuinely abundant, because otherwise intelligence becomes a resource people fight over, "a tool for rich people." Amodei spends a whole section of his essay on mental health specifically, guessing that AI-accelerated neuroscience could compress a hundred years of progress on depression, PTSD, and addiction into five to ten AI-accelerated years, expanding what he calls "cognitive and mental freedom." Different people, different essays, same bet underneath: a good answer, delivered fast enough to matter and reaching everyone at close to the same time, is what actually changes a life.
What abundance actually buys
What happens when a real second opinion costs about as much as texting a friend? You don't feel right, something you'd be slow to bring to a doctor and slower to bring to a friend, and you ask instead of sitting with it. Amodei's bet is that good medical advice becomes a default: seconds away, rather than something you have to know the right person to ask. That's the gap closing for the person who never had access to good advice in the first place, the person who never had a therapist and never will.
Shefa
In contemporary Hebrew, shefa means abundance or plenty. In Kabbalah, it means something more specific: the constant flow of divine sustenance moving from the highest, least reachable place down through every level, until it reaches the world people actually live in. Abundance that never flows all the way down is simply wealth sitting somewhere unreachable.
The Hebrew word for understanding, the specific kind of intelligence that processes what flows in, is binah. It's also the name of one of the ten sefirot, the very channel shefa runs through on its way down from Keter and Chokhmah to the world. Abundance of intelligence sounds like a modern coincidence of phrasing, except the system already had a name for the moment insight arrives as a flow from somewhere higher.
That is the same failure Altman points to when he warns that AI could become "a tool for rich people." Two vocabularies, separated by thousands of years, describe the same problem: abundance means very little if it never reaches people.
What happens once it flows?
Once the flow actually reaches the bottom, people get more curious, not less. A question that used to cost too much to ask, in money, time, or the awkwardness of asking a person, gets asked. Then the next one. Curiosity is expensive when a wrong guess costs an afternoon or a fight. It's nearly free when a decent answer costs ten seconds. That's the part I actually mean by optimistic: AI's whole contribution is making asking cheap enough that people finally do it, constantly, and the asking turns out to be most of the work.
Altman is betting on massive prosperity, Amodei on cured minds. My bet is smaller and closer to home: intelligence flowing all the way down, passed around by the handful, until everyone becomes a little more curious and a little quicker to feel better.
Sources
- Sam Altman, "The Intelligence Age" (Sep 2024): on making compute abundant so it doesn't become "a tool for rich people," and on "massive prosperity" as a defining trait of the era.
- Dario Amodei, "Machines of Loving Grace" (Oct 2024): the neuroscience and mental health section, on compressing a century of progress on mental illness into "5-10 AI-accelerated years" and expanding "cognitive and mental freedom."
- Shefa as the continuous divine flow through the sefirot, from Ein Sof through Keter, Chokhmah, and Binah down to Malkhut. Satyori, Kabbalah Concepts: Shefa; Chabad.org, The Sefirot.