The word “tool” evokes a hammer, a wrench, or a drill. No one would say of Twitter that it is merely a tool; this would be an obvious oversimplification of a highly complex system. Twitter is no mere tool but an extension of our very perceptive faculties. For just as you learn that someone is knocking on your door by your ears, you can learn what is happening in the world by notifications on your feed. You could equally say that our five senses are “just tools.”
The “just a tool argument” is used frequently by defenders of disruptive technologies who want to wave off the potential risks. It is the kind of argument you regularly encounter if you say anything negative about AI development.
The argument comes in many different forms, but the through-line is pretty consistent. There will be some bad side effects of new technology, of course, but the tech itself is morally neutral. Good and bad is going to come from it no matter what. It’s the people behind it that you’ve got to worry about.
The word “just” is doing a lot of work here. It is true that A.I. systems like ChatGPT or Midjourney are, in the most general sense, tools, but this is a trivial statement. What does the tool do? What is the scope of its operations? What will it replace? How will it effect our lifestyles?
Marshall McLuhan, the Mid-Century media theorist famous for his phrase, “the Medium is the Message” can help us better understand the complexities of new technologies. Explaining the meaning of that statement, McLuhan said in this worthwhile vintage documentary:
“A medium is not something neutral, it does something to people, it takes hold of them, it roughs them up, it massages them, it bumps them around… and the general roughing up that any society gets from a medium, especially a new medium, is what is intended to be indicated in that title.”
When McLuhan says “Medium” he is really speaking of tools, or “mankind’s extensions.” He argues in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, that tools are, in essence, the expansion of our five senses. They do not merely enable us to do complex things in the world, they change the very manner in which we perceive reality and our means of interacting with it.
This is certainly a different way of thinking about tools than we are accustomed to, but it’s an important frame shift. Even something as simple as a cup is going to change my behavior. If there were no such thing as cups, I might have to stick my face into a stream to take a drink of water and that’s going to have big implications on my behavior beyond just saving me a couple minutes of walking down to the stream. It means predators will have a harder time sneaking up on me at the river. It means I can now take water with me, store it for long durations, and open up whole avenues of planning and travel that were, before this, entirely closed off to me. The cup extends my capabilities, and as such, it is an extension of me.
From this, we can not only understand why calling an AI “just a tool” is a gross oversimplification, but we can also see that moralizing about technology can be beside the point. It isn’t necessary in this discussion to talk about tech’s inherent goodness or badness. We can limit ourselves to pondering its effects. We just have to turn our eyes away from how these tools will enable us to shape the world, and start looking at how using these tools will shape us.
On paper social media is just a means to stay connected to people who you aren’t sharing geographic space with but, obviously, the breadth of its effects and uses extend far beyond that. To say that generative-AI art is just a way for people to visualize their ideas is equally reductive. We’re in the nascent days of this technology, where the products that are going to shape the future are just now hitting the public at scale in their most primitive forms. We’re at a critical juncture where we need to think deeply about what some of these effects might be. I shared some of my own thoughts on Midjourney and Generative AI Art in this post last year, and it hasn’t aged much so far.
If we are wary of social media’s effects on us as a culture, we should be equally, if not more so, with respect to AI. Its arrival brings not one new medium to reckon with, but countless, and the obsolescence of just as many. We better darn well think about its implications for our societies.
Even if AI were “just a tool” here’s McLuhan again to remind us of what a mere tool can do.
When Australian natives were given steel axes by the missionaries, their culture, based on the stone axe, collapsed. The stone axe had not only been scarced but had always been a basic status symbol of male importance. The missionaries provided quantities of sharp steel axes and gave them to women and children. The men had even to borrow these from the women, causing a collapse of male dignity. A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind. (McLuhan 24).
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 24.