Mary Midgley
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 Mary Midgley. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Mary Midgley'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 pipe I didn't know was broken was the one inside my own argument.
I wrote in You On AI that AI is an amplifier. I still believe that. I wrote that the question is whether you are worth amplifying. I still believe that too. But Mary Midgley would have stopped me right there, wrench in hand, and asked a question I hadn't thought to ask: What exactly do you think you're amplifying?
Because I had been treating intelligence as though it were a single signal. A clean thing you feed into a machine and get back louder. Midgley spent sixty years showing that this is exactly the kind of reduction that sounds like clarity and functions like a pipe leak. Intelligence is not a signal.
