87
There's no such thing as Just a Tool | deadSimpleTech
deadsimpletech.comHeidegger 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*.
I can tell that you didn’t read the article aside from the bullet points, because the point of the article is to refute these ideas presented at the beginning. It is about how tools are often culturally enshrined, how they directly affect people while also being designed by us. I encourage you to read it in full.
Of course he refutes them. He establishes the points to argue against them. The problem is he is setting up a straw man to argue against. I know the whole arguement is about how AI isn’t “just a tool”, except that it is. The difference is how you define a “tool” and he establishef an odd definition of tool to argue against