In the age of AI, arguing with God matters more than ever

Richard Ferrer’s new satirical novel Error 404 imagines scientific proof of God’s nonexistence. In it, certainty arrives at the speed of a push notification, and humanity discovers that proof is not the same as meaning. I write about artificial intelligence from a hillside in Efrat, and I am here to report that Ferrer’s satire has already quietly shipped. Roughly a billion people now carry a device that answers the meaning questions before they have finished asking them.

The machines do not just calculate logistics. They write eulogies. They counsel the bereaved at three in the morning. They tell the lonely what they are worth. My sons will grow up with an oracle in their pockets that never sleeps and never says I do not know.

The Necessity Engine

Ferrer’s book argues that religion evolved because humans needed meaning, and last week’s exchange in these pages put that thesis through its paces.

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Living where I do sharpens the question. This country ran a national water system into the ground through the 1990s, then rebuilt it into the most water-independent nation on earth through desalination and reuse.

Faith here has never been an alternative to competence. The same society that argues over divine providence runs its deterrence through software, and the same tradition that debates a line of Talmud built a technology sector that underpins security tools used far beyond its borders.

Necessity, it turns out, is a mother of invention in more ways than one. What the machines cannot supply is the reason any of it matters, and the surprising lesson of the Jewish state is that scarcity forces exactly that question.

The Flawless Answer

Here is what unsettles me about the clergy of this new religion. A human rabbi or priest who counsels you has skin in the game, a tradition behind them, and the humility of someone who has buried people they love.

The chatbot has none of that, and its answers are always fluent, always confident, always calibrated to please. Set a machine that never doubts beside a tradition built on arguing with God, and the tradition starts to look like the counterculture.

Press coverage already shows what happens when manufactured narratives outpace the slow work of verification. If that is what manufactured stories can do to something as checkable as a battlefield report, imagine what a machine that manufactures comfort and meaning could do to something as personal as faith.

What Genesis Got Right

The Biblical answer to the meaning question was never information. It was obligation. You are meaningfully human because you are responsible to people, a community, a place, and a story longer than your attention span.

That answer is annoying. It requires showing up. The machine’s answer is frictionless and free, which is exactly why the Jewish one still wins wherever people are paying attention. On my hillside, between Shabbat tables and a tech corridor, the old interface keeps outperforming the new one.

Error 404 ends by asking whether humanity can live with proof of God. The machines have answered that question for us. We can live with anything.

What we cannot live without is each other.

• Mark Ginsburg is a technology writer for Times Of Israel. Error 404 by Richard Ferrer is out now in paperback, audiobook and on Kindle