There's no such thing as Just a Tool | deadSimpleTech
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Heidegger thinks about tools like so: a tool is something (a thing that has being in the Heideggerian sense, not necessarily an object) that represents an extension of human capabilities in some way. A tool is thus any kind of thing that *lets you do something you wouldn't otherwise have been able to*. The important (for us) conceptual leap here is that when a tool works well, or isn't broken, it develops what Heidegger describes as a "ready-to-hand" quality: the tool fades into the background as a kind of human-tool gestalt of a human with the additional capability afforded by a tool forms. As a simple example of this, consider eating with a fork. When the fork is well-designed and not broken, *you don't explicitly have "I am using a fork" in your conscious mind while eating dinner*.
  • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    82·
    6 days ago

    TL:DR I don’t think it’s a thought-terminating cliche. I know it’s long, I tried to edit it down, but I have a lot of thoughts on the topic.

    I don’t think it’s a thought-terminating cliche at all; more of a framing device. I think there is an important difference between what I’ll collectively call “AI software” (that is, tools) and the people who use them to cause harm, and I further think that conflating the two obscures the path toward correcting the harm.

    I think Heidegger’s human-tool gestalt is a good framing device for explaining how people use tools as an extension of their wills, and capabilities. Some of these capabilities allow people to harm others in ways that were previously impossible or impractical; tools that enable such capabilities are dangerous tools. There are many such tools: guns, nuclear warheads, hammers, cars, corporations, and so forth. I think “AI software”, indeed all software, sits comfortably in the category of dangerous tools.

    Tool availability also affects how we solve problems, as the author points out. That too is a consideration that is often deemed negligible by the “it’s just a tool” crowd, I think to their detriment. How our tools affect us is a huge component of figuring out how tools fit into society.

    However, just because humans are influenced by the tools at their disposal does not mean the human-tool gestalt is atomic. I think that treating it so obscures one of the means by which we can prevent harm, namely: to separate the person doing the harm from the tools they use to do it.

    I think it’s important to distinguish between different kinds of tools. There are LLMs and diffusion models, and then there are corporations that offer services based on these tools. The corporations are themselves tools, much the same way that multi-tool pocketknives are tools composed of many smaller tools. The people who operate the corporations are using these dangerous tools to hurt other people.

    What, then, do we do with all these new human-dangerous-tool gestalts running around wreaking havoc? I think when a person is causing harm with tools, it’s important to strip the person of their tools. I think this is as true for LLMs as it is for cars, and guns, and corporations. Remove the tool from the person, and their capacity for harm is reduced.

    This can also be done proactively too, which is why we have things like licenses for dangerous tools like forklifts and cars. Whether or not we can do a better job at preventing harm with these proactive measures is a good question, and I think the answer is yes. I think it’s good to keep in mind that the tools we use to restrict dangerous tools are themselves dangerous tools, and they should be used judiciously, but I don’t think that something being a dangerous tool means that a total ban is the best approach, if it’s even a viable approach. c.f. America’s prohibition experiment.

    So I land at “yes, the tools themselves are ‘just’ tools” but I don’t think it qualifies as a thought-terminating cliche. Tools are neither harmless nor beneath our consideration in the conversation about building a better world. The fact that they are “just” tools isn’t a dismissal or any sort of justification, but it is an important difference to distinguish, I think, in figuring out how to solve the problem of malicious tool users.

    • calliope@retrolemmy.com
      52·
      6 days ago

      I’m pretty sure the only requirement of a thought-terminating cliche is that they are

      intended to end an argument and bypass cognitive dissonance with a cliché rather than a point

      It genuinely doesn’t matter what Heidegger’s human-tool gestalt says if people are using “it’s just a tool” as a thought-terminating cliche.

      The reason it sounded like a thought-terminating cliche to me was this part of the article itself:

      What this response seems to mean is the following:

      • The technology being discussed has no bearing on the attitudes or ideologies of the person holding it: use or non-use is ideologically neutral.
      • The technology being discussed can be effectively separated from the people using it: nothing can be inferred about a person from the technologies that they use.
      • The technology is used fully consciously: you are always fully aware that you are using a technology and have complete volitional freedom to use a different technology at any time.
      • The technology does not influence the kinds of things likely to be done with it: use of the technology doesn’t tend to encourage one course of action over another (“guns don’t kill people, people do”).

      They’re describing aspects that are cliche and constructed to not have a point.

      • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        The reason I decided to reply was this:

        There’s a term for phrases like “it’s just a tool”: thought-terminating clichés.

        Here you’re treating thought-terminating clicheness as a quality inherent to the phrase “it’s just a tool”, not to the subjective motivations of the people using the phrase in a thought-terminating capacity.

        I think, especially in discussions where strong opinions abound and form cliques, labeling certain phrases as “thought-terminating cliches” is itself a form of permission to forego any critical engagement with an argument. Or, to put it another way, to use a cliche to terminate thought. I think it’s worth my time and effort to say, essentially, “hold on, I don’t think we should immediately dismiss anyone who tries to distinguish the tools from the tool users, that line of thought has some important and useful ramifications for this conversation.”