Don Ihde
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 Don Ihde. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Don Ihde'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 I trust most is the one I can no longer see.
That sentence should terrify you. It terrifies me, now that I understand what it means. For months I celebrated the moment Claude became invisible in my workflow — the moment I stopped noticing the machine and just built. I called it flow. I called it liberation. I wrote entire chapters of *You On AI* praising the collapse of the translation barrier, the feeling of never having to leave my own way of thinking.
Don Ihde would have had a different word for it. He would have called it transparency. And in his framework, transparency is not a compliment. It is a warning.
Ihde spent four decades at Stony Brook building a