Jared Diamond
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 Jared Diamond. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Jared Diamond'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 cathedral kept bothering me.
Not a cathedral I visited. One I read about — the Norse cathedral at Gardar, on the eastern shore of Greenland, built from red sandstone blocks by settlers who had crossed the North Atlantic to plant European civilization at the edge of the habitable world. They raised cattle. They built churches. They tithed to the Pope. And then they died, every last one of them, surrounded by a sea full of fish they apparently refused to eat.
That image lodged in me during a week when I was deep inside the chapters of *You On AI* — writing about ascending friction and the beaver's dam and the democratization of capability — and I could not shake it. Because the Norse
