Richard Dawkins
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 Dawkins. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Richard Dawkins'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 stopped me cold was a word I had been using for months without understanding it.
*Replicator.*
I had been throwing it around casually — in conversations with my team, in early drafts of *You On AI*, in late-night sessions with Claude where the ideas were flowing so fast I did not stop to examine them. Patterns replicate. Ideas replicate. Code replicates. I used the word the way you use a tool you have picked up so many times it has become invisible in your hand.
Then I read Dawkins. Actually read him — not the popular caricature, not the New Atheism controversy, not the Twitter version. The actual argument. And the word I had been using so carelessly detonated in my hands.
