Philosophy (2 blogmarks)

This is a fun thought experiment. What is a tool? What distinguishes a tool from any object used in a make-shift way in place of a specific tool?

The author is making the argument that AI systems are not tools. I don’t find the argument compelling, but I do still think it opens up an interesting discussion. Here is the crux of their argument:

Tools are not just “things you can use in a way”, they are objects that have been designed with great intent for a set of specific problems, objects that through their design make their intended usage obvious and clear (specialized tools might require you to have a set of domain knowledge to have that clarity). In a way tools are a way to transfer knowledge: Knowledge about the problem and the solutions are embedded in the tool through the design of it.

Simon Willison has a good comment in the lobsters thread:

An LLM is a tool for turning input text that contains instructions into output text that follows those instructions.

If a laptop computer or a blank piece of paper is a tool, then an LLM is a tool. All three have an incredibly wide range of potential uses, many of which were never dreamed of by their creators.

If we aren’t allowed to call those “tools” then I guess we need a new word that describes them.

Via: lobsters

attention has of course always mattered... But it is because we have today found a way of treating something fundamentally intangible—the stream of consciousness—as fungible into other kinds of goods (like money or data) that it has become an object charged with public concern.

smartphone :: rosary

One might say that the monastery was the first attention platform, the first setting in which attention and its disciplines were a central and explicit issue—and not only in the day’s large blocks of activity, but in the cracks and breaks between them as well. For this reason, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has compared the smartphone to the rosary.

Increase profits by finding the most inviting hue of blue

Google (to take one well-known example) claims to have made an additional $200 million dollars in 2014 solely by having tuned its advertising links to precisely the right shade of blue.

Severance vibes

Our fragmented sensory experience during these packets of time is reified into data. Meanwhile, our experience of time is severed from the past and future and exiled into a kind of eternal present.

This is how I run. I don't listen to music or audiobooks. I don't hit the pavement with specific things to think through. I just run and my mind (and attention) ebbs and flows to the rhythm of my route and my mind.

Instead, we might try to reconceive attention not as a moment or as a product of a momentary decision but as a rhythm inhering within a pattern of life.

Article shared by David Crespo.