multijimbo

I keep coming back to the Toolmaker Koan. I’ve written about this before HERE (and perhaps elsewhere). But the koan is basically the observation that the ability to make tools seems to outpace the capacity, the understanding to use those tools well.

We are developing, and have developed, some incredibly powerful tools, whether we use a limited definition of tool or a broad definition. I’ve been reading a lot about the machine learning tools we’ve been developing, such as the large language models that machinize a strange global average of language.

There is a lot of speculation about what impact these large language models and their successors will have on current human civilization. I work in one of the professions, education, that is sometimes mentioned as one of the professions at risk, with speculation such as individual artificial intelligences for each person, developing and monitoring their own individual educational journey.

We will spend the next few years working through the implications of this particular tool, hoping that we don’t find ourselves in a Skynet or Colossus scenario. But there are other tools.

There is the classic tool that provokes thoughts of survival or destruction: the fission bomb and its bigger, angrier cousin, the fusion bomb. I won’t spend much time here, because we’ve been living with this for decades now.

There are many directions we can go from here. One is to broaden the definition of tool. We are experiencing at the moment interesting consequences of the limited liability corporation, and I think the corporation is a fascinating tool.

One idea here is that the corporation is a form of artificial (perhaps collective) intelligence. We act as individuals, but we also act as part of this larger organization, which as its own goals, which might be goals with longer time lines than individual human lives.

So many tools to consider. And right now, I’m watching Unknown: Cave of Bones on Netflix, thinking about stone tools and the the earliest amongst us who had captured fire. And perhaps even ritual as one of our earliest tools. There is so much we don’t know and we will never know.

But I do think this is one of the fundamental questions for us to consider. How do we use well the tools we develop.

~ by Jim Anderson on 30 July 2023.

Posted in bizarre and random things