Timothy Morton
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 Timothy Morton. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Timothy Morton'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 thing I could not find a metaphor for was the thing itself.
I had the river. Intelligence flowing for 13.8 billion years. I had the beaver. Building dams with sticks and mud and teeth. I had the fishbowl. The water you breathe without noticing. These images carried me through *You On AI* because they gave shape to something I could feel but not name — the sensation of being inside a transformation so total that the transformation includes you, your tools, your thinking, your capacity to describe what is happening.
Then I encountered Timothy Morton, and the images broke open.
Morton is a philosopher who studies entities too large to see. He calls them hyperobjects — things so massively distributed across time and
