AI Is Not A Tool

Image credit: Janno Nivergall on Pixabay A lot has been written about how is not “just a tool”. I think brettcodes wrote a pretty cogent treatment in this essay: AI is not “just a tool” Why it is irresponsible to continue to frame the use of AI-powered software as “just a tool.” brettcodes.com Iris Meredith beautifully captures what it means to use a tool; how the “human-tool gestalt” precipitates a change in the mindset of a person using a tool. There's no such thing as Just a Tool | deadSimpleTech 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…