Terrence Deacon
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 Terrence Deacon. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Terrence Deacon'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 word I kept misusing was "intelligence."
I used it hundreds of times writing *You On AI*. I built an entire metaphor around it — the river of intelligence, flowing for 13.8 billion years, from hydrogen to humanity to whatever comes next. I meant something by it. I believed what I meant. But I was treating the word like a simple thing, a single substance flowing through different channels, when the reality is that what happens at each channel is not just more of the same current. Something fundamentally new emerges. Something that was not present before and cannot be reduced to what came before.
Terrence Deacon showed me the difference between a river that gets wider and a river that freezes into ice.
That
