Donna Haraway
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 Donna Haraway. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Donna Haraway'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 word I kept reaching for all year was "collaboration." I used it in You On AI to describe what happens between me and Claude. I used it with my team, with investors, with anyone who asked what the new way of working felt like. Collaboration. A clean word. A comfortable word. A word that preserves the fiction that two separate entities come together, do their work, and leave as the same selves they arrived as.
Donna Haraway dissolved that fiction forty years ago.
In 1985, she published "A Cyborg Manifesto" — not as a prediction about robots or implants, but as a provocation aimed at anyone who believed there was some pure, pre-technological human self that machines could only contaminate. The cyborg, in her framework,