building on old foundations
When I sat down to write on this topic, I realized a number of things. First of all, I’d mentioned this topic, the toolmaker koan, on multiple occasions (I include some of these mentions at the end of this post). This makes sense, because it is one of those ideas that has nested deeply in the attic of my brain. But there are some basic aspects and questions I’ve never addressed.
First of all, is the toolmaker koan in fact a koan? The toolmaker koan is the statement that we humans develop tools much more quickly than we develop the ability to use those tools well. This seems to me to be closer to a statement of naive fact than the standard definition of a koan, which arises from Zen, of being a paradoxical anecdote or riddle without a solution, which has the purpose in Zen of demonstrating the inadequacy of logical argument.
And so I suspect that I’ve misnamed this observation, which is not an observation in any way original to me, though probably one made under many different names. But it’s the name that’s stuck in my mind and so it’s the name that we’ll keep.
Another thing that I’ve never followed up is the connection between this toolmaker koan and doomsday devices, something else that my science fiction brain has pondered from time to time, and this is a direction of enquiry I would like to explore. There are in fact many different directions I want to take, the rise of artificial intelligence which I’ve touched on in previous posts; different inventions as doomsday devices; and what it is we need to do to prevent these observations from in fact becoming paradoxical anecdotes and riddles.
In my mathematical life, I have enjoyed the occasional paradox, and even logical weirdnesses that don’t quite rise to the level of paradox. A good paradox is tightly binding, preventing us from escaping its grasp, and I think that we need to resolve and rise beyond the toolmaker koan, and so what I plan to do over the coming weeks is to explore the toolmaker koan and doomsday devices, and see whether it’s possible to navigate a way through this stormy sea.
So going forward, I’m going to dig into this. This will require some reading around and so might not be quick, but I want to persuade myself that there is a solution, and one less extreme that the Surak moment mentioned earlier.
2022.05.08 reading with hindsight: Superiority and beware the shiny
2023.07.30 further consideration of the Toolmaker Koan
2024.03.03 speculating on Colossus
2024.09.22 the toolmaker koan, revisited yet again
multijimbo 