Martin Buber

Foreword

By Edo Segal

There is a case to be made for spending time with Martin Buber at this particular moment, and the case is not primarily historical.

Not because Buber was a great philosopher, though he was. Not because his ideas are historically important, though they are. Rather, because Buber saw something about the nature of human encounter that helps explain what happens to builders in rooms like the training room in Trivandrum, and in a hundred conversations with Claude since, and what might be happening to any reader who works with AI and feels something shift.

Buber distinguished between two fundamental modes of being in the world. I-It relationships, in which the other is treated as an object to be used. And I-Thou relationships, in which the other is met