Baruch Spinoza
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 Baruch Spinoza. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Baruch Spinoza'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 tool does not care what you feed it.
I have written that sentence in different forms across every chapter of You On AI. It is the thesis that holds the whole tower together. The amplifier amplifies. It does not judge. The quality of the output depends entirely on the quality of the input. Your clarity or your confusion, scaled equally, with equal indifference.
I believed I understood what that meant. Then I spent three months inside the philosophy of a lens grinder from Amsterdam who was expelled from his community at twenty-three for the crime of thinking too clearly, and I discovered I had been using the right words without grasping their full weight.
Spinoza asked a question that the AI discourse has somehow failed to ask,