Bernard Stiegler

Foreword

By Edo Segal ^ Opus

The word I needed was not in any technology lexicon.

It was pharmakon. Greek. Ancient. It means remedy and poison simultaneously — not remedy with side effects, not poison in small doses. The same substance, indivisible. The attempt to separate the healing from the harm destroys the thing you are trying to understand.

I encountered this word in Bernard Stiegler's work months after I had already described the identical phenomenon in cruder language. In You On AI, I wrote about the tool that was making me more capable and less careful in the same gesture. About the exhilaration that curdled into compulsion somewhere over the Atlantic. About the engineer whose eight years of expertise became strategically irrelevant on a Tuesday afternoon — not because the expertise was wrong, but