Richard Sennett
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 Richard Sennett. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Richard Sennett'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 thing that kept nagging me was the invisible joint.
I watched a video of a Japanese woodworker fitting a mortise-and-tenon connection — forty minutes of shaving fractions of millimeters from a piece of wood that would be completely hidden once the furniture was assembled. No user would ever see it. No customer would ever know. The precision existed because the craftsman's internal standard demanded it, and that standard had been built, layer by layer, through decades of hands on resistant material.
I closed the video and opened Claude. I described a feature I wanted built. Three minutes later, I had working code. It was correct. It was clean. It shipped.
And something about the contrast would not leave me alone.
In *You
