Cal Newport
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Cal Newport. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Cal Newport's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The hour I should have stopped was the hour I kept going.
I know the exact moment. Somewhere over the Atlantic, deep into a transatlantic flight, a hundred-and-eighty-seven pages into a draft that had started as exhilaration and curdled into something mechanical. The ideas had stopped arriving. The sentences were getting longer without getting better. I was not writing because the book needed it. I was writing because I could not stop.
I describe that moment in The Orange Pill. What I did not have, at the time, was the vocabulary to diagnose it. I knew something was wrong. I could feel the difference between the sessions where real thinking happened and the sessions where I was just moving words around at high speed. But I
