Marcel Mauss
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 Marcel Mauss. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Marcel Mauss'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 thing I almost missed was what my own hands were doing.
I have typed for thirty years. At terminals, at keyboards, at laptops balanced on airplane tray tables at two in the morning somewhere over the Atlantic. I never once thought about the typing itself. The rhythm my fingers found when the thinking was flowing. The way my posture shifted when I was stuck. The particular quality of silence I needed to hear a problem clearly enough to ask Claude the right question.
It was invisible to me. The way water is invisible to fish.
Then I encountered Marcel Mauss, a French anthropologist who died before the first computer was assembled, and he made me see my own hands. He spent his career studying the things no