Marshall McLuhan
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 Marshall McLuhan. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Marshall McLuhan'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 I almost didn't hear was my own.
I was three months into writing You On AI, deep in the collaboration with Claude that produced the book you may have already read, when I played back a voice memo I'd recorded during a late-night session. I was describing an idea about how AI changes the creative process — and mid-sentence, I stopped talking. Not a pause. A halt. The kind of silence that happens when your mouth is ahead of your mind and your mind has just hit something it wasn't expecting.
On the recording, the silence lasts eleven seconds. Then I said, quietly, almost to myself: "I don't think I'm describing what the tool does. I think I'm describing what the tool does to me."
That