Emile Durkheim
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 Emile Durkheim. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Emile Durkheim'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 team I kept was the decision that cost me the most.
Not financially — though the arithmetic was brutal every quarter. The cost was cognitive. Every board conversation required me to defend a choice that the numbers said was wrong. Twenty engineers, each now capable of doing what all twenty used to do together. The math wrote itself: keep five, cut fifteen, pocket the margin. I chose differently, and I describe that choice in *You On AI* as a moral decision rather than an economic one.
What I could not articulate at the time was *why* it was moral. I knew it in my body — the way you know a codebase is wrong before you can point to the bug. Something would break if I