Michael Tomasello

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The thing I missed was so obvious I'm embarrassed to say it out loud.

I spent months writing You On AI describing what it felt like to think alongside Claude — the exhilaration, the vertigo, the sense of being genuinely met by a mind that could hold my half-formed ideas and return them clarified. I described the collaboration as partnership. I used the word "together" without examining what it actually required.

Then I encountered Michael Tomasello's research, and the word broke open.

Tomasello spent four decades running experiments that isolated something so fundamental to human cognition that most of us never notice it, the way fish don't notice water. Nine-month-old infants point at things — not to demand them, but to share attention. To create a moment