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(I keep delivering this as a quip, here's a bit more)
First order of business - is ' tool ' going to have an interesting, distinguishing and thus illuminative meaning or be a mere platitudinous stand-in for "anything useful"?
We'll save tool as "anyone/thing that can be exploited" for the AI titans, for whom VCs, politicians, wannabe-titan-CEOs, software devs, rural towns etc are all 'tools'. The pockets on the front of my shirts are useful (I need to keep my reading glasses handy), but they are not tools. Similarly, fast food drive-thru windows are useful, but are not tools (more later).
a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function an instrument (such as a hammer or saw) used or worked by hand : an instrument used by a handicraftsperson or laborer in their work
What I like best - A tool is something you wield .
wield - to use (as a tool or instrument) especially with full command or power : handle, manipulate, control
Held in your hand - a source of both control and feedback, and an indication of the intimacy of the act of use Power - force, energy transmission and direction, leverage etc Control - intention and continuous directing of the course of events
Tools are implements with which you do something, they do not do things for you. Tool use builds, rewards, and often requires, expertise and skill. The continuous application of technique and energy, and sensory feedback, are essential to the buildup of expertise (from experiri - "try").
Good tools have many properties LLMs lack - they are predictable, reliable, deterministic, of bounded function, hopefully simple etc.
What you learn while wielding a tool is something about the world, the task, the physics, logic etc of what you are trying to do or the situation you are trying to overcome. And often, something about yourself.
As a lifelong tool builder and user, I know what tools are. LLMs are not tools.
Control, sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, continuous direction, expertise etc are all missing from LLM use. LLMs are not wielded. LLMs are automation .
automation - (of a device or process) working by itself with little or no direct human control.
A drive-thru is not a tool for cooking, it is automation for avoiding cooking. LLMs are not tools with which you write code - they are automation with which you avoid writing code, to which you abdicate writing code.
You don't direct the action of an LLM - you make requests and it acts on its own, without your energy or continuous direction. This request/automation cycle is not wielding, it's not control, it's not continuous, it's without feedback.
What you are doing while using automation, instead of learning real-world truths, is attempting to divine the details du jour of some automaton. And striving to game them - e.g. ordering a custom burger (no onions) in order to get a freshly made one. Or filling voodoo.md with just the right incantations. You are only a software update from everything you've 'learned' being rendered obsolete by the latest algorithm. (A soggy cold burger from which the onions have been removed) You have traded working with the world to working for a capricious robot.
It is a mistake to be haphazard about "tools" being equivalent to utility, e.g. saying - "the LLM didn't write my paper, I just used it as a tool to read and summarize some research papers". But you didn't wield it to read those papers (as you might a Kindle). It read the papers, not you.
What do you miss by abdicating doing the reading? Pretty much everything. First and foremost, you miss learning how to write from those who can. You miss learning how to formulate an argument. You miss noticing things. You miss loading your background mind with fodder for novel ideas. You miss building trust in some authors and suspicion of others. You miss all the jokes. You miss all of the edges. You miss learning how to think.
Tools don't get "misaligned", they don't "go rogue", they don't "escape containment", "conspire" etc.
LLMs are not tools. I know many people use the phrase "just tools" simply to indicate "they are what you make of them". Except that's not true . Automation has intrinsic properties and differences from tools that you ignore at your peril.
For clarity: I, the human, do something when I instruct AI, typically Claude, to do something. It's a tool. I asked Vibe: "Is it reasonable to describe AI as a tool?". https://chat.mistral.ai/work/eb5cc87d-8b94-43ec-9bcb-daef25ade478 tl;dr it's a reasonable and common description, but it's worth being precise about what it implies.
Nomenclature is a hard thing. Probably that's why it is so difficult to name variables and functions. We use words to mean things that the words can not explain completely. In this sense, independent of classifying LLMs, or agents or systems that we call incorrectly AI, as automation in opposition to tools, I think that the feeling of what Rich Hickey brings here is of great importance. The fact is that LLMs (I'll use the same name used in the article for simplicity) robs us from the control, from the experience of interacting and learning with the code we were producing by ourselves before. Many people have the sense that they can learn by reading how the automaton have solved the problem, but learn by seeing the job done is much poorer than learning by doing the work yourself. This hard part give us the chance to really fix the ideas on our minds and to prepare it to be able to explore new paths for new ideas or to build new mental tools to solve new kind of problems. When we take a shortcut we loose too much. All in the name of producing faster and faster (but we really need all this speed?). ... continues
Well then, it's a "magic tool" like a wizard. I'm OK with that... You can conjure up complex names and reclassify—but it is always a binary set of instructions/algorithms in a neural net. Until Neuralink joins millions into organic/binary cyborg chimeras. People in the past wouldn't understand how a human can control a drone with their brain, but it is going to happen via "Magic tools"
Honestly, I think many of the tools that we can choose to use for things nowadays have a degree of automation about them. Tool or automation is not a binary classification, rather we have quite a few tools that automate certain things (as in, the automation is part of the tool, e.g. a calculator), while giving user control over certain other things. But so far, for most of our tools, the degree of automation/control had been fixed. With LLMs that is different now: you as a user are free to choose how much of the work you delegate. You can let the LLM generate a function, or you can let it generate the entire codebase. So you can choose yourself where it sits on that spectrum from tool to automation. Therefore I think it is wrong to say that LLMs are not a tool; that depends entirely on how the user is using the LLM, and in this sense they are in my opinion quite incomparable to anything else that had existed before. Some anecdotal evidence of this is the fact that there are people who are really "good" at using them and do not seem to suffer from atrophy in their skills and thinking, and then there are some other people who do experience these negative consequences from usage, of missing things as described in the article.
Thank you for spelling that out so clearly. The lack of determinism and feedback also excludes LLMs for any notion of "it's a mill, but this one is CNC! Same tool but automated!" arguments.
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