Any tool can be a hammer if you use it wrong enough.
A good hammer is designed to be a hammer and only used like a hammer.
If you have a fancy new hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Any tool can be a hammer if you use it wrong enough.
A good hammer is designed to be a hammer and only used like a hammer.
If you have a fancy new hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It’s more like Jefferson’s dumbwaiter, in that it was created by someone who verbally supported an egalitarian utopian vision of society, but the device itself is a scale model of an exploitative social system. At one station of the device, unpaid/low-paid labor operates out of view of the user, and then at the other station, the user enjoys an almost-magical appearance of an answer to their request.
No tool is “just a tool”, after all. In that way, AI is like a hammer.
(That section of the video leans heavily on Do Artifacts Have Politics?, which is a pretty short and accessible essay. If you’re not convinced that artifacts do have politics, and you don’t want to watch the video, just read a few paragraphs of the essay.)