John Ruskin
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 Ruskin. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate John Ruskin's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
I build things with machines. That's what I've done my whole career — figure out what the technology wants to become, then try to get there first. I've shipped products that used AI before most people knew what a neural network was. I am not a Luddite. I am not nostalgic. I don't think the past was better. I need you to understand that before I tell you what happened when I read Ruskin.
A friend gave me *The Stones of Venice* during a period when I was prompting Claude maybe two hundred times a day. Drafting product specs, writing investor updates, generating UI copy, brainstorming names — the full stack of language tasks that used to take me hours and now took minutes. I was