Simon Schaffer
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 Simon Schaffer. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Simon Schaffer'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 instrument I trusted most was the one I understood least.
Not Claude. I knew Claude was a black box — everyone who uses it knows that. The instrument I never examined was the measurement itself. When I stood in that room in Trivandrum and watched my engineers achieve what I called a twenty-fold productivity multiplier, I was reporting what I saw. What I did not ask — what it never occurred to me to ask — was how much of that fact was produced by the lens I was looking through.
Twenty-fold compared to what? Measured how? By whose definition of productivity? Over what timescale? With what assumptions about what counts as output and what counts as noise?
These are not hostile
