James March
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 James March. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate James March'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 number that broke my confidence was not twenty. It was one.
One week. That is how long it took for my entire engineering team in Trivandrum to reorganize itself around a tool none of them had used before. By Friday, the old workflow was not just slower — it was unthinkable. Nobody voted on that. Nobody filed a change request. It simply happened, the way water finds a new channel when you remove a rock.
I celebrated it. I wrote about it. I stood on stages and described the transformation with the specific pride of someone who believes he is witnessing the future and helping to build it.
Then I read James March, and I realized I had described the phenomenon without understanding the mechanism. I had