When the Machine Asked the Right Question
I uploaded Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling into NotebookLM last week.
I want to be honest about why I uploaded it.
Partly curiosity. Partly a test. Partly because I have read that book several times over the course of my adult life, and I wanted to see whether an AI tool would flatten it into something manageable — and whether I would feel relieved or insulted when it did.
The book is nearly two centuries old. Kierkegaard wrote it under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio — John of Silence — which is itself a theological statement. The central figure is Abraham. The central problem is not faith as most people use the word.
I love the summary it produced:
Not faith as confidence. Not faith as belonging to the right tradition.
Faith as terror. Faith as paradox. Faith as the willingness to obey God when obedience cannot be reconciled with reason, ethics, or any framework the world offers for making sense of one’s actions.
The nine-minute video took several minutes to generate. Then I pressed play.
The Three-Day Ride to Moriah
What struck me immediately was that it had identified the same tension that keeps drawing me back to the book.
One of Kierkegaard’s deepest complaints — made through Silentio’s voice, which is not quite Kierkegaard’s own — is that we have made Abraham comfortable. We praise him so quickly and so easily that we never stop to feel the weight of what he was asked to do. Silentio calls this out directly: people speak of Abraham in honor, give the whole thing “an entirely ordinary expression,” and manage, in the course of talking, to exchange “Isaac” and “the best” as though they were interchangeable abstractions. The listener stretches out his legs comfortably. The pipe is lit.
“The one thing left out of Abraham’s story is the anxiety,” Silentio writes. “For to money I have no ethical obligation, but to the son the father has the highest and holiest obligation.”
The Prelude — four variations on the three-day ride to Moriah — exists precisely to prevent comfortable reading. Each version reimagines what might have happened on that journey, and none of them is reassuring. In one, Abraham tells Isaac it was his own desire, not God’s command, so Isaac will not lose faith in God — and Abraham carries the lie home forever. In another, Abraham returns from Moriah with his arm intact but his eyes darkened, unable to forget what he had been willing to do.
These are not decorative flourishes. They are Kierkegaard’s method: force the reader to sit with the story long enough to feel its horror before permitting any resolution. The three-day ride is not incidental. It is where the meaning lives.
The Relief Was Interesting
The AI somehow understood this.
One slide asked: What would you do on the three-day ride to Moriah?
Another noted that praising Abraham’s sacrifice while ignoring the terror, anxiety, and what was, in human terms, a looming murder, was precisely the mistake Kierkegaard spent the whole book trying to prevent.
And then, at the very end, the video posed a final question:
What difficult plunge into the absurd must you take today?
I laughed.
I want to be precise about that laugh, because it was not dismissive. It was relief. I had been watching the video in a low-grade state of suspicion, waiting for the moment it would betray the book — compress it into bullet points, reduce the paradox to a management lesson, make Abraham comfortable again. It did not do that. It asked the question Kierkegaard wanted the reader to confront.
The relief was real. So was the recognition that the relief itself was interesting.
Why should it matter whether a machine handles a difficult book with care? Why should I feel anything about it at all?
Translation, Not Replacement
For years I have watched serious ideas disappear into inaccessibility.
Dissertations that took a decade to write. Books that changed the people who read them. Essays with genuine precision and moral weight. Most people never encounter them — not because the ideas lack value, but because accessing them requires a prior investment of time and attention that most people are never positioned to make. A dissertation becomes a PDF. A PDF becomes an archive. An archive becomes forgotten.
What I saw in that nine-minute video was something different from what I expected. Not replacement. Not summarization. Something closer to translation — an attempt to carry the structure of an argument across a distance, into territory where it might actually do something.
A nine-minute video will not replace Fear and Trembling. It cannot. The book works the way it works because Kierkegaard — through Silentio — refuses to resolve the paradox. The knight of faith is indistinguishable from the bourgeois shopkeeper. Abraham cannot explain himself. The ethical is genuinely suspended, not merely complicated. You cannot get that in nine minutes.
But you might get enough to make someone read it.
The purpose of a bridge is not to be the destination. It is to make the destination reachable.
There is something fitting about using one of the newest tools available to engage one of the oldest questions humanity faces.
What does obedience require when it costs everything?
What does faith mean when it cannot be made legible to anyone else?
How do we live when certainty is not available and the stakes are absolute?
These are not technological questions. They were not resolved in the nineteenth century, and they will not be resolved by artificial intelligence. The tools change. The questions remain.
For all the discussion about AI replacing human thought, my experience last week felt different. The machine did not answer the question. It surfaced it. It created a nine-minute on-ramp to a book that demands to be read slowly, and then it closed with precisely the question Kierkegaard wanted left open.
As for what difficult plunge into the absurd I must take today — I am leaving that where Kierkegaard left it.
In the silence between the question and the answer.
Where it has always belonged.
Paul Weaver writes at paulweaver34.substack.com on Bitcoin, faith, institutional trust, and the spaces between worlds.