Heidegger thinks about tools like so: a tool is something (a thing that has being in the Heideggerian sense, not necessarily an object) that represents an extension of human capabilities in some way. A tool is thus any kind of thing that *lets you do something you wouldn't otherwise have been able to*. The important (for us) conceptual leap here is that when a tool works well, or isn't broken, it develops what Heidegger describes as a "ready-to-hand" quality: the tool fades into the background as a kind of human-tool gestalt of a human with the additional capability afforded by a tool forms. As a simple example of this, consider eating with a fork. When the fork is well-designed and not broken, *you don't explicitly have "I am using a fork" in your conscious mind while eating dinner*.

The human-car gestalt, for example, experiences life and has opinions that are quite different from the human-bicycle gestalt, the human-train gestalt or even the bare human with no mode of transportation. What’s possible and what’s desirable for a driver is pretty radically different even to what’s possible or desirable for the same human outside of a car: in individual instances of this happening, we call it road rage, and on a policy scale it leads to things like people getting extremely angry about bike lanes even when said bike lanes would benefit them at all times when they’re not in their car. The human-car gestalt has interests and opinions that are separate from the human in the gestalt, often opposed to them and able to assert them over the human part of the gestalt.

It is an unfortunate fact that, when faced with such an analysis of technology, tech people will often think that for whatever reason the considerations that apply to literally the entire rest of the world of technology somehow don’t apply to them. This kind of overweening arrogance is, of course, why we find ourselves in so much of the shit that we’re in, but nonetheless, to really get my point across it’s probably a good idea to spell out how these dynamics operate in the tech world specifically.

  • Snort_Owl [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    13·
    9 days ago

    Software engineering and it’s tooling is all built towards trying to make it more like factory work and increase output in the bid to make more software. LLMs are another aspect of this where the concern always is for capital to increase the amount of garbage shit we make.

    LLMs do not improve existing software, they do not optimise, they do not fix, they do not iterate and they especially do not delete. A frustration I’ve had with software “engineers” for my entire career is all they want to do is serve what capitalism wants and shovel ever increasing quantities of garbage out the door because everyone seems to be programmed to want to ship crap. STOP MAKING THINGS WE DON’T NEED YOUR GARBAGE SOFTWARE.

    I have reached the point in my career where I spent most of my time just deleting other people’s code. LLMs just means I have more crap code to delete. Like a solid 80% of code written is a solution in search of a problem and I end up gutting half of these half baked frameworks people write that solve nothing at all. If you think your output with an LLM is good I can absolutely guarantee you are just creating problems and solving nothing and someone else is going to have to tidy up your crap later. One of the most important decisions an experience software engineer can make is to write no software at all because all code is debt making more of it isn’t a good thing.

    White collar work is the endless toil of inventing problems to justify your job and somehow we have convinced ourselves that’s how we should actually operate and it’s not infact a survival mechanism for a system that doesn’t work and the LLM is the ultimate tool for the system that doesn’t work

  • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    9 days ago

    The base idea of the essay is not wrong but I don’t feel like it’s saying anything new. Tools and technologies have shaped our behavior, how we interact and view the world since time immemorial basically, I think people like her are implicitly buying into techbro propaganda by making AI into a bigger deal than it realistically is nowadays. We survived the invention of the nuclear bomb, we’re probably gonna survive the stochastic parrots too.

    Also

    After all, all kinds of fascinating weapons systems are being used in defence of freedom and democracy in Ukraine, and this is both good and necessary

    jagoff completely unnecessary addition to the essay.

    • insurgentrat [she/her, it/its]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      9·
      9 days ago

      She’s not saying we won’t survive, she’s saying using the technology will change the person using it, software and software culture, and the motivation of people. For the worse, given the nature of them. We’ve survived heaps of shit that made the world worse, maybe we should have resisted cars more? or the machine gun? or leaded petrol?

      On this instance right now lots of people are claiming they’re “just a tool” so clearly the idea of gestalts (which can be seen as far back as homer with the famous translation “the blade itself incites to deeds of violence”) bears repeating. Especially given the arrogance of tech and it’s subservience to capital.

      The Ukraine thing is whatever, it has no bearing on her actual point.

      • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        32·
        9 days ago

        she’s saying using the technology will change the person using it, software and software culture, and the motivation of people. For the worse, given the nature of them.

        Did the invention of agriculture change human civilization for the worse because it lead to the establishment of class society? I don’t know, maybe? Thing is it happened and it’s not going away, same as AI (well maybe AI is a bubble and it is going away who the hell knows at this point). Moralizing about this kind of stuff is not something Marxists should do, it’s part of the progression of history whether we find it personally appealing or not, the point is to struggle to steer it into a positive outcome.

        • insurgentrat [she/her, it/its]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          10·
          9 days ago

          Morphine exists and has uses but that doesn’t mean Marxists should use it uncritically or regard its applications in arresting boredom through the same lens as its applications in treating people with physical trauma.

          Iris even says that she has found it useful for certain things, but that isn’t an argument for using it uncritically or regarding widespread use as inevitable.

          The text is very specifically against the framing that it is some neutral tool.

          LLMs have been used, at this point, to build quite a few useful tools: hell, even I’ve had some success using them when I’ve tried. These are all valid arguments, but in the gestalt framing they don’t actually refute the point: it’s quite possible for a tool to be used for good things, and in fact for it to be necessary, but for the viewpoint that it fosters to nonetheless be one that we shouldn’t encourage.

          • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            31·
            9 days ago

            Morphine exists and has uses but that doesn’t mean Marxists should use it uncritically or regard its applications in arresting boredom through the same lens as its applications in treating people with physical trauma.

            Yeah, you also shouldn’t turn on your stove and put your face on it but should rather use it to cook food, I feel like this kind of stuff goes without saying. I’m not sure who you’re arguing with here, I don’t think many people on this site would say AI use is always completely neutral and harmless, when people say it’s “just a tool” they mean that it’s not ontologically evil as some people like to portray not that it’s entirely harmless and outside of political consideration, I think we’re just arguing semantics here.

            • orlando [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              9 days ago

              we don’t live metaphysically enough to justify our ethics on this “not ontologically evil” technicality. they’re tools fascists built for us to use so we’d waste our brains away. that’s all that’s available to us, not some utopian worker’s owned singularity.

            • insurgentrat [she/her, it/its]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
              4·
              9 days ago

              Tools change how we think and what our motivations are. The very use of morphine sociologically creates recreational morphine users, motivates us to farm poppies and guard the fields with violence and shit. You can’t have one without the other.

              A human-stove gestalt isn’t motivated to put their face on it. But they are motivated to desire fire codes, home kitchens, exhaust fans, and in older times a right to absolutely fuck air quality. Or consider how the human-gas stove gestalt is motivated to push back against air quality safety regulations given the academic evidence that they cause harm. It should be a no brainer to just not hurt yourself and your family and change technologies, but habituation has changed motivations to the extend that the human-gas stove gestalt wants things that actively harm the human.

              It’s not some abstract point. A human-llm gestalt will want different things, many of which may be harmful and if you use these things you need to be aware and avoid it. Like avoiding becoming carbrained when using a car. Idealistic vibes aren’t enough, we need systems and rules and politics or it will be the motor vehicle again.

  • mar_k [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    9 days ago

    Humans can be tools for each other too. What if I use you as a stepstool to reach something for us on a high shelf? Is it a human-human-stepstool gestalt? What if me reaching that high item for us simultaneously makes me your handygrabber?

  • Sleepless One@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    9 days ago

    [W]e shall have to rely on the work of notable Nazi (and unfortunately also very important 20th century philosopher) Martin Heidegger.

    several paragraphs later…

    …all kinds of fascinating weapons systems are being used in defence of freedom and democracy in Ukraine, and this is both good and necessary…

    Lol

    Goofing aside, it’s a good article. I am becoming increasingly alienated from my coworkers because of how LLMs affect the human/LLM cyborg (trying to avoid the nazi philosopher’s jargon). A perfect example of this happened to me the other week.

    I was in daily standup and, after we went over the status of all the tickets on the board, one of the devs asked what to do in the meantime since github copilot was down. I suggested he just write code the normal way, but all the other devs pushed back on it. Tbf I was pretty unhinged and irritable since I was early into nicotine withdrawal. Still, this other dev who’s been in the industry roughly as long as I have (both senior in title), who I know was able to do dev work perfectly fine before the slop machines, is now automatically assuming he can’t write code without an LLM. It’s only going to get worse since my employer is signing a contract with Anslopic so we can all be forced to use Clod.