'AI' is not a tool
(I keep delivering this as a quip, here's a bit more)
First order of business - is 'tool' going to have an interesting, distinguishing and thus illuminative meaning or be a mere platitudinous stand-in for "anything useful"?
We'll save tool as "anyone/thing that can be exploited" for the AI titans, for whom VCs, politicians, wannabe-titan-CEOs, software devs, rural towns etc are all 'tools'. The pockets on the front of my shirts are useful (I need to keep my reading glasses handy), but they are not tools. Similarly, fast food drive-thru windows are useful, but are not tools (more later).
Some definitions of 'tool':
- a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function
- an instrument (such as a hammer or saw) used or worked by hand : an instrument used by a handicraftsperson or laborer in their work
What I like best - A tool is something you wield.
- wield - to use (as a tool or instrument) especially with full command or power : handle, manipulate, control
Especially useful in that are:
- Held in your hand - a source of both control and feedback, and an indication of the intimacy of the act of use
- Power - force, energy transmission and direction, leverage etc
- Control - intention and continuous directing of the course of events
Tools are implements with which you do something, they do not do things for you. Tool use builds, rewards, and often requires, expertise and skill. The continuous application of technique and energy, and sensory feedback, are essential to the buildup of expertise (from experiri - "try").
Good tools have many properties LLMs lack - they are predictable, reliable, deterministic, of bounded function, hopefully simple etc.
What you learn while wielding a tool is something about the world, the task, the physics, logic etc of what you are trying to do or the situation you are trying to overcome. And often, something about yourself.
As a lifelong tool builder and user, I know what tools are. LLMs are not tools.
Control, sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, continuous direction, expertise etc are all missing from LLM use. LLMs are not wielded. LLMs are automation.
- automation - (of a device or process) working by itself with little or no direct human control.
A drive-thru is not a tool for cooking, it is automation for avoiding cooking. LLMs are not tools with which you write code - they are automation with which you avoid writing code, to which you abdicate writing code.
You don't direct the action of an LLM - you make requests and it acts on its own, without your energy or continuous direction. This request/automation cycle is not wielding, it's not control, it's not continuous, it's without feedback.
What you are doing while using automation, instead of learning real-world truths, is attempting to divine the details du jour of some automaton. And striving to game them - e.g. ordering a custom burger (no onions) in order to get a freshly made one. Or filling voodoo.md with just the right incantations. You are only a software update from everything you've 'learned' being rendered obsolete by the latest algorithm. (A soggy cold burger from which the onions have been removed) You have traded working with the world to working for a capricious robot.
It is a mistake to be haphazard about "tools" being equivalent to utility, e.g. saying - "the LLM didn't write my paper, I just used it as a tool to read and summarize some research papers". But you didn't wield it to read those papers (as you might a Kindle). It read the papers, not you.
What do you miss by abdicating doing the reading? Pretty much everything. First and foremost, you miss learning how to write from those who can. You miss learning how to formulate an argument. You miss noticing things. You miss loading your background mind with fodder for novel ideas. You miss building trust in some authors and suspicion of others. You miss all the jokes. You miss all of the edges. You miss learning how to think.
Tools don't get "misaligned", they don't "go rogue", they don't "escape containment", "conspire" etc.
LLMs are not tools. I know many people use the phrase "just tools" simply to indicate "they are what you make of them". Except that's not true. Automation has intrinsic properties and differences from tools that you ignore at your peril.
Rich
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12m
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Well, this was a twitter-like controversial clickbait but I will say it anyway. LLM is a tool. To be more specific, it's a lossy knowledge base with a human language for querying and built-in summarization.
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1h
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A tool is a human construction. A thing doesn't become a tool until an entity makes it so. A rock is not a tool to a dog but it can be a tool for a human. So whether something is a tool or not is interpreter relative very similar between the difference between syntax and semantics. A symbol is meaningless, a sequence of symbols is meaning less. The sequence of symbol has no meaning without an interpreter and different interpreters will derive different semantics from the same sequence.
Using AI coding agents can be viewed in the same light. Using AI coding agents can be viewed as an extension of your "hammock programming" or "rubber duck programming" except the rubber duck talks back
No matter how smart or expert someone is they don't understand most things around them. How much of the world do we really understand? very little. How much of the Linux source code does Linus understands in detail? Not much but he doesn't need to know the details. He builds mental models and abstraction boundaries. Working with AI requires building mental models and abstraction boundaries too. We depend multi-layered abstraction boundaries to navigate the world . AI tools allow us to build higher level abstractions
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3h
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This is way too narrow. It's going to exclude jars, baskets, paperweights, sundials, mouse traps, plumblines, measuring rods etc
Let alone things like clocks and books and sextants and steam engines. Or double entry book keeping and Clojure.
Computers are tools. And so is the software that runs on them. Including LLMs
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5h
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When people call artificial intelligence a "tool," they do so in the hope that it is unlike them—and will not displace them. In reality, however, the creators of AI aim to do precisely that: replace the people whose jobs the technology can take over. AI is certainly not a tool.
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6h
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Interesting distinction. When AI operates with less direct human control, the focus shifts from simply using the system to designing the right checks, feedback loops, and boundaries around it. Understanding what to automate—and where human oversight still matters—is essential for using AI responsibly.
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