“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”

Edit:

Controversial reply, apparently, but this is literally part of the script to a Philosophy Tube video (relevant part is 8:40 - 20:10)

We sometimes think that technology is essentially neutral. It can have good or bad effects, and it might be really important who controls it. But a tool, many people like to think, is just a tool. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” But some philosophers have argued that technology can have values built into it that we may not realise.

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The philosopher Don Idhe says tech can open or close possibilities. It’s not just about its function or who controls it. He says technology can provide a framework for action.

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Martin Heidegger was a student of Husserl’s, and he wrote about the ways that we experience the world when we use a piece of technology. His most famous example was a hammer. He said when you use one you don’t even think about the hammer. You focus on the nail. The hammer almost disappears in your experience. And you just focus on the task that needs to be performed.

Another example might be a keyboard. Once you get proficient at typing, you almost stop experiencing the keyboard. Instead, your primary experience is just of the words that you’re typing on the screen. It’s only when it breaks or it doesn’t do what we want it to do, that it really becomes visible as a piece of technology. The rest of the time it’s just the medium through which we experience the world.

Heidegger talks about technology withdrawing from our attention. Others say that technology becomes transparent. We don’t experience it. We experience the world through it. Heidegger says that technology comes with its own way of seeing.

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Now some of you are looking at me like “Bull sh*t. A person using a hammer is just a person using a hammer!” But there might actually be some evidence from neurology to support this.

If you give a monkey a rake that it has to use to reach a piece of food, then the neurons in its brain that fire when there’s a visual stimulus near its hand start firing when there’s a stimulus near the end of the rake, too! The monkey’s brain extends its sense of the monkey body to include the tool!

And now here’s the final step. The philosopher Bruno Latour says that when this happens, when the technology becomes transparent enough to get incorporated into our sense of self and our experience of the world, a new compound entity is formed.

A person using a hammer is actually a new subject with its own way of seeing - ‘hammerman.’ That’s how technology provides a framework for action and being. Rake + monkey = rakemonkey. Makeup + girl is makeupgirl, and makeupgirl experiences the world differently, has a different kind of subjectivity because the tech lends us its way of seeing.

You think guns don’t kill people, people do? Well, gun + man creates a new entity with new possibilities for experience and action - gunman!

So if we’re onto something here with this idea that tech can withdraw from our attention and in so doing create new subjects with new ways of seeing, then it makes sense to ask when a new piece of technology comes along, what kind of people will this turn us into.

I thought that we were pretty solidly past the idea that anything is “just a tool” after seeing Twitler scramble Grok’s innards to advance his personal politics.

Like, if you still had any lingering belief that AI is “like a hammer”, that really should’ve extinguished it.

But I guess some people see that as an aberrant misuse of AI, and not an indication that all AI has an agenda baked into it, even if it’s more subtle.