The Abundance of Intelligence

"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 fell out 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." They are making the same bet: a good answer changes a life when it arrives in time and reaches everyone.

A second opinion

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

The Kabbalists used the same word for the 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 wealth sitting somewhere unreachable.

The Hebrew word for understanding, the kind of intelligence that processes what flows in, is binah. It is also the name of one of the ten sefirot, one of the channels shefa passes through on its way down. I read that as an interpretation, not a proof, but the old system had a place for the moment insight arrives as a flow from somewhere higher.

The warning is familiar. Intelligence only helps when it reaches people. If it stays with a small group that can afford the infrastructure, abundance is only a word.

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.

My hope is that intelligence reaches everyone, passed around by the handful.

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