Pope-King Joe

‘AI’ is Not a Tool Rich Hickey

(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. Recommended by LinkedIn

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

I usually just walk down the hall and move the mouse. I don’t really need remote monitoring. 😅

Yeah they just wanna normalize their awful, idiotic views. Fucking asshats.

Setting up a flash drive with Ventoy is something I’d highly recommend. Then you can just drag-n-drop isos as you see fit and boot any of them from a nice menu. I keep one around with Fedora, CachyOS, Arch, and Clonezilla isos. I also think I may have an older version of Garuda on it. It’s a super useful thing to have around.

Or a third of a dollar for that matter.

Control. Promotion of ideals that not-so-secretly align with their own.

That’s legit the only reason I still remember it. I had just turned 30 a few weeks beforehand, and it had at least a year and a few months on me.

Right on. One of the first computer parts I ever owned personally was a 40GB Maxtor drive, right before or around the time Seagate bought them. I can’t remember how it happened, but at some point the raw drive was dropped down a flight of stairs. Worked just fine for several more years before finally failing.

About a decade ago, I did some contract work for a local credit union upgrading some of their systems and one of their secondary servers had an old Maxtor drive that had over 31 years of uptime on it. It was wild because at the time, that drive had been running constantly longer than I had been alive.