I like your suggestion of AI as 'object' rather than tool, especially since it can't be neutral yet. The hammer, or any tool of that kind, is effectively a closed/solved problem. Awareness of the positive and negative possibilities allows for neutrality, and I'm not sure how possible it is to see generative AI in the same way any time soon, if ever. That's before even considering the biases you rightly mention. More useful food for thought.
Thanks! I also like to talk about the history of literacy technology in a similar light. I think I mentioned in an early post that Socrates railed against the evils of writing. (He was especially worried about memory.) Now writing in general as a tool/technology is similarly "closed," even if its particularly uses are still very much open to critical engagement. Can you think of another technology that we're still ambivalent about in the same was as AI?
Ooh, nice point about writing. Looking in between writing and AI, I can see an ambivalence around the internet. As a kid, I'd be on bulletin boards and then the early web, telling my friends that the internet was going to change the world. But, like so many, I was mostly thinking in a positive light at the time. Hmm...
Given how broad the term 'the internet' is, and how the ideas and technologies around it evolve, there's a less 'closed' feel ongoing. In the traditional sense of ambivalence, having strong feelings in both directions, I guess I'm still in that place.
At the same time, you've got me thinking about writing now. As a tool it's closed, but has generative AI prised it open slightly, or at least brought along the potential for that, dependent on where this object of AI takes it?
I like your suggestion of AI as 'object' rather than tool, especially since it can't be neutral yet. The hammer, or any tool of that kind, is effectively a closed/solved problem. Awareness of the positive and negative possibilities allows for neutrality, and I'm not sure how possible it is to see generative AI in the same way any time soon, if ever. That's before even considering the biases you rightly mention. More useful food for thought.
Thanks! I also like to talk about the history of literacy technology in a similar light. I think I mentioned in an early post that Socrates railed against the evils of writing. (He was especially worried about memory.) Now writing in general as a tool/technology is similarly "closed," even if its particularly uses are still very much open to critical engagement. Can you think of another technology that we're still ambivalent about in the same was as AI?
Ooh, nice point about writing. Looking in between writing and AI, I can see an ambivalence around the internet. As a kid, I'd be on bulletin boards and then the early web, telling my friends that the internet was going to change the world. But, like so many, I was mostly thinking in a positive light at the time. Hmm...
Given how broad the term 'the internet' is, and how the ideas and technologies around it evolve, there's a less 'closed' feel ongoing. In the traditional sense of ambivalence, having strong feelings in both directions, I guess I'm still in that place.
At the same time, you've got me thinking about writing now. As a tool it's closed, but has generative AI prised it open slightly, or at least brought along the potential for that, dependent on where this object of AI takes it?