Chris Anderson
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 Chris Anderson. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Chris Anderson'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 price I keep watching is not the one on the stock ticker.
It is the price of making something. The cost — in time, in skill, in capital, in institutional permission — of turning an idea that lives in your head into an artifact that lives in the world. That price has been falling for my entire career, and I have built companies at every step of the descent. But in the winter of 2025, the price did not fall. It cratered. It approached a number so close to zero that the entire economic logic I had spent decades operating inside simply stopped applying.
When the cost of building software collapsed to the cost of a conversation, I felt the vertigo I describe throughout *You
