John Dewey
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 John Dewey. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate John Dewey'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 sentence that stopped me was not about technology. It was about doing.
Intelligence is not a thing you possess. It is a thing you practice. John Dewey wrote that in various forms across seven decades of work, and I had never encountered it until I was deep into the research for this book. When I did, something clicked that had been refusing to click for months.
Here is what had been bothering me. Every conversation I had about AI — at conferences, at dinner tables, in the quiet panic of a parent asking what their kid should study — was framed around having. Do the machines have intelligence? Will we still have jobs? Does my child have skills that matter? The verb was always possessive. Intelligence as a