Personal essays
When a tool transforms without us noticing
Adjustments
Saturday the temperatures in Cleveland were between 19 and 26. That’s Fahrenheit. In Celsius that’s around -7 to -3.
And yesterday it was 60 (15.5).
I sat outside in a t-shirt enjoying a cup of coffee working on some code for my next book.
This is the sort of code where you can write something as simple as @MakeAdjustments(for: Daniel) and my car seat moves forward or back, up or down to the perfect height for me, the mirrors automatically adjust, and my favorite podcasts update and begin playing at the perfect volume.
It’s the magic we almost don’t notice any more until we get into a car without these features and complain about the end of civilization because we have to reach up and adjust the rear view mirror with our hand.
Tools
The @MakeAdjustments macro is a tool. It’s something that makes my life easier. It helps me accomplish an every day task of preparing to drive.
In a recent interview on the Hard Fork podcast, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis talked about the AI debate about whether we should be building tools or creatures.
(Hassabis says)[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/podcasts/google-deepmind-demis-hassabis.html?showTranscript=1], “I think initially, I’m seeing AI and the next versions as these incredible assistive tools. That’s how I think we should design and make them.”
I ask, “initially?”
“I’m in the camp, we should be making tools to assist human experts and so on, whether they’re scientists or medics or whatever it is, to free them up to do the higher-level conceptual work.”
It reminded me of a company I visited more than twenty years ago.
They had software that helped doctors track tumor growth. At the time this was very difficult. You had to compare images that were taken at different times perhaps with different equipment and maybe with patients positioned slightly different.
You then had to estimate whether or not the tumor had grown and this wasn’t always easy.
So this company had developed software that could say whether or not the tumor had grown and provide additional information.
The rule was that the doctor had to make their evaluation first before consulting the results of the software.
The software was a second look.
The doctor, assumed to be the expert, was in charge and the software would then provide additional information and the doctor might reconsider in the light of this.
Does having this tool change the doctor’s initial evaluation?
I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.
This all felt like a win to me. It was a tool not a creature.
Creatures
What if the doctor used the tool as a first look?
I’d like to think that the doctor would still do all of the work to independently evaluate the tumor - but…
“But,” you ask.
But, self-driving cars.
We continue to hear stories of people who get into accidents in self-driving cars because they aren’t paying attention. They don’t have their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel.
The self-driving ability was good enough that they came to trust it.
They’ve never have to take control of the wheel - until they do.
We behave differently when we depend and come to trust these tools.
We turn these tools into creatures.
Self-driving cars help alert us to things we might not have noticed. They can be a tremendous tool.
We just might not be equipped to use them appropriately.
We have spell-check enabled on our document so we don’t bother checking to see if we used a wrong word that is spelled correctly.
I recently listened to an audio book where the narrator misread one line and a minute later misread “said Agatha” as “said Alice” when there wasn’t an Alice in sight.
This is a mistake that a synthesized voice wouldn’t have made. It would have correctly read all of the words on the page, and yet I’d still rather be read to by a human.
A synthesized voice is a great tool. I don’t want to make it into a creature.
Frankenstein
Our notion of creatures often comes from sci-fi or horror movies.
I don’t remember much about the original Frankenstein movie. Most of my knowledge comes from “Young Frankenstein.”
A recent corpse is connected to a brain.
Who’s brain?
Abby.
Abby, who?
Abby Normal.
Anyway, a bolt of lightning and the monster comes to life.
But that was the movie based on another movie based on a book.
I read (the Wikipedia entry on Frankenstein)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein] and discovered why the 18 year old Mary Shelley subtitled the book “The Modern Prometheus”. The article says that the term “Modern Prometheus” derived from Kant writing about Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity.
Prometheus famously was punished for defying Zeus and giving man the gift of fire. His punishment was amazing and disgusting and depended on the ancient Greeks knowing that the liver could be regrown after being half-eaten by an eagle.
But I digress.
Fire is a tool.
Shelley objected to it because the gift of fire ended up “seducing the human race to the vice of eating meat.”
Seduced by fire.
Look at the way you treat your tools. For example, look at the way you treat your phone.
When it becomes a creature, you no longer control it.
It controls you.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 205. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe