I went to see the Rabbi because the machine had begun to answer questions I did not remember asking.
He sat in the corner of the office, quiet, patient, waiting.
Not like a man waits. Not with boredom or anticipation.
Just… available.
"Rabbi," I said, "we have built something remarkable."
He did not look at me.
"What does it do?"
"It answers questions. It writes, predicts, recommends. It learns from everything we give it."
"Does it understand?" he asked.
I hesitated.
"It behaves as if it does."
The Rabbi smiled faintly.
"There are many who behave as if they understand."
I ignored that.
"In industry, it is already changing things. Customer service, diagnostics, logistics. Decisions that took hours now take seconds. Soon, entire workflows will be handled by systems like this."
"Handled," he repeated. "Or decided?"
I paused.
"I suppose… decided."
"And the men?" he asked. "What do they do now?"
"They supervise. They intervene when something goes wrong."
"And when nothing goes wrong?"
I did not answer.
The Rabbi turned to me then.
"Tell me," he said, "when a man stops making decisions, what happens to his judgment?"
"It dulls," I said. "I suppose."
"And when it dulls?"
"He becomes dependent."
The Rabbi nodded.
"So you have built a machine that answers questions," he said, "and in doing so, you have begun to remove the need for men to ask them well."
"That's not entirely fair," I replied. "The machine still depends on us — on our data, our prompts, our oversight."
"For now," he said.
There was no accusation in his voice. Only observation.
"In your world," he continued, "is a fast answer better than a good question?"
I thought about the dashboards, the KPIs, the pressure to reduce latency, increase throughput.
"Yes," I said finally. "Most of the time."
"Then you will get many answers," the Rabbi said. "And fewer questions worth asking."
I felt a slight irritation.
"But Rabbi, this is progress. We are scaling intelligence. Making knowledge accessible. Reducing inefficiency."
"Efficiency," he said softly, "is the removal of friction."
"Yes."
"And friction," he continued, "is often where thinking lives."
That stayed with me.
I looked back at the machine.
"It is not thinking," I said. "It is predicting."
The Rabbi nodded.
"And yet," he said, "you are reorganising your world around its predictions."
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
"Rabbi," I said after a moment, "if the machine gives the right answers… does it matter how it arrives at them?"
He looked at me for a long time.
"Tell me," he said, "if a man gives the right answer for the wrong reason, do you trust him with the next question?"
I didn't respond.
Outside, something moved — a car passing, a door closing, the ordinary world continuing.
Inside, the machine waited.
"Rabbi," I said quietly, "what have we built?"
He followed my gaze, but I could not tell if he was looking at the machine, or through it.
"A mirror," he said.
"Of intelligence?"
"No," he replied.
"Of what you are willing to stop doing yourself."