alt Hacker News'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey
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I think Rich's comment reply here explains the post:
> Commenter: Well, this was a twitter-like controversial clickbait but I will say it anyway. LLM is a tool. To be more specific, it's a lossy knowledge base with a human language for querying and built-in summarization.
> Rich Hickey: Agreed. I'm talking about its embodiment in conversational systems purporting to be 'tools' for doing homework, research, coding, writing etc.
With that framing in mind, the article makes a lot of sense. AI agents are not tools for coding, they automate coding, which means you lose control, learning, predictability, etc.
In and of itself, an AI agent is a tool, can be used for things, like say making software, but if thinking of it as a tool for coding, that appears wrong, as using one changes the modality of the task, you are not coding using a tool, the coding is no longer done by you and has been automated.
As he also says, reading an AI summary of a paper is a different modality from using it to read the entirety of a paper, therefore it is not a tool for reading the way a Kindle, glasses, reader-mode are. And similar to with coding, you've lost things from automating the reading, that reading just a summary does not provide.
I had a chance to ask Rich about the subject at the latest Conj. I admit, my question was too vague, I asked him: "what are your thoughts on how AI is reshaping our industry?", to which he vaguely replied that he's "not participating in this [experiment]", he admitted that he hasn't explored LLMs too deeply and he simply thinks they are not good, not to mention tons of other concerns - moral, economic, etc. I said, "well, I wish I had the luxury to choose, but many of us have no choice here, we're simply forced to use the darn thing..."
It is very difficult to disagree with anyone of the caliber such as this man, but I wanted to steer the conversation away from the generative aspect of LLMs and focus on the consumption side, because frankly, these "tools", and I think even though I might agree with Rich that LLMs by themselves are not tools, the harness I built to work with them definitely is one. I think there's an immense value there, way before you even start talking about code-generation, or code at all. I think I have failed to explain my points, because a talk we both wanted to see was about to start.
In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of
human intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [10]:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine
that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any
any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of
these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could
design even better machines; there would then unquestionably
be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man
would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent
machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make,
provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to
keep it under control.
...
It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century,
an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be
the last invention that man need make.
Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue
its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort
he describes would not be humankind's "tool" -- any more than humans
are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.
It is like saying that a lathe is not a tool. Technically true, the tool is just the cutting part, not the whole machine.
But does it matter outside of the shop? It's the thing the machinist uses to make stuff, so, for all intent and purposes, a tool.
Rich Hickey's flair for words not withstanding, I believe he is right on this.
Huge respect for Rich Hickey, and anything he says is worth thinking deeply about.
That said, I think this particular semantic distinction is something we need to think about more from a political perspective than a semantic precision perspective. A tool is something that humans (or animals, or other entities) control for their own purposes. It's important that AI remain a tool of humanity to serve human purposes, following human accountabilities. Because the alternative narrative is that AI is a super-intelligence with it's own agency which we can not control, and while it may make a small handful of individuals incredibly wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, they can't be held accountable because AI has its own agency.
The word "tool" is obviously very old and carries tons of connotation shaped by the world of the past. AI clearly challenges a ton of assumptions about what "tool" and many other words mean. Therefore, while I understand Hickey's point, I think for the sake of our civilization and the moral hazard we are facing, it's better that we consider AI a tool versus whatever narrative the AI cultists are cooking up.
Hickey is being a bit narrow sighted here, and ignoring some of the ways that humans are using AI outside of coding.
I’m someone that is, and has been, for most of my career, someone from the in-between lands. I don’t use paper maps from the gas station, but I have not coded much.
I basically grew up with DOS 1.0 and on. Often made a living being able to sit at a Windows workstation and think and persist so I could figure out in four hours what other people could not, in that buggy strange world of microcomputers many of us grew up in.
Those situations, now, often take me five minutes to get past, instead of four hours. It has been a game changer for me.
Ivan Illich makes a similar argument in Tools for Conviviality (1973) where he distinguishes tools you work with versus tools that work for you.
Author’s definition of tool feels too narrow. What about tools of the mind?
I love Rich Hickey's speeches, and found this entertaining, but it seems pretty pedantic.
I mean, I guess there's a lot of people that don't know the difference in what he's saying.
`rm` is a tool. You don't tell `rm` to delete things and then get annoyed when it deletes your production database because it inferred incorrectly.
It does what you tell it. Like a hammer hits what you hit with it.
`claude` can be considered a version of `rm` that can do what `rm` does (and other things - including things you don't want). Nearly everyone using it is aware of that.
An employee is not a `tool`.
`claude` is closer to an employee. You tell it to do things. It costs you money. Sometimes you get what you wanted, sometimes you get something far better, sometimes you get literally nothing, other times you get disaster (more often with `claude` than with a good employee).
That's why they call it an `agent`, not a `tool`.
Employers don't throw up their hands and say, no thanks, I'll do everything myself with `tool`s. They say, I'll try to learn how to better manage employees which are useful to further my goals (along with tools - because both are useful).
Not every person runs a business. Maybe in the future most people won't be using AI at all. Some people definitely will.
I'm not sure why we needed to go on this pedantic ride.
When people say "AI is just a tool", I think they mostly know what they mean and we all do, too.
Is car a tool?
- because car companies are definitely misaligned with their customers
It's a useful piece because it shows how considering AI a tool is nothing but lying to yourself.
If you shipped something understanding none of it, you did nothing. Claude did it. Writing 'code' is not just typing characters that compile, it's maintaining a system of ideas. If you don't know anything about those underlying ideas, what did you even do? How are you not trivially replaceable?
You can argue all day about these topics, but ultimately, the paychecks, the customers, the prestige, etc will be proportional to the non-AI value that you can offer to the world.
I agree 100% to what Rich has to say here, especially because, as Rich always writes, he goes to the dictionary to find correct definitions to support his argument. But I think this is a lost battle, because there is always going to be the camp of people of "BuT lAnGuAgEs EvOlVe".
Yes, Janet, languages do evolve. But why do you think dictionaries exists? Solely for teaching purposes? No, it is because at the end of the day, sometimes there is a need for a correct definition to establish a foundation for some argument of some kind.
But I know people are going to ignore and simply say his arguments have no validity.
A shame, beause in this he actually wrote a very clear separation of software that is a tool and aoftware that is automation. And he didn't even say AI is bad or any other thing. He simply says: AI is automation, not a tool. Use accordingly
Do you consider a camera an automation and not a tool? This type of romanticing of effort is a tired old debate that has not aged well...
Reminds me of Baudelaire:
"the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies"
Semantics, ok, they are "assistants" that can go rogue, escape confinement, etc.
And they are a hell of a useful "assistant"
a semantics discussion but I think it would be fair to call them "indeterministic tools" and there are other tools that are indeterministic besides LLMs
People try to wrangle the indeterministic outputs through deterministic layers to convert the indeterminism to something determined
Whether you agree with him or not, this is a wild post to be flagged.
AI, as it currently exists in the marketplace, is used, engaged, and distributed to be a tool.
"AI" as it was known until ~2023 could also be useful as an algorithmic implementation to solve an objective.
Now that definition is squishy, but still relevant.
The main thing I'm taking from this article is that (editiorialized) "AI is a tool like a drive-through is a tool for cooking."
Why are you a tool?
Who says I'm a tool?
You are a tool.
"All told, a monad in X is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors of X, with product × replaced by composition of endofunctors and unit set by the identity endofunctor."
Agentic AIs (what he's talking about) are agents, obviously; you set the goal, they decide the means. Traditional programs are automation. Totally different, qualitatively.
Software has been called tools for decades. He author is going against the grain of the regular usage of the word.
So gdb isn’t a tool then. Huh, that seems odd.
AI is only a tool, it isn’t anything more than that. I use AI because work pays for an expensive subscription, and I’ve found it helpful… as a tool.
Aww shucks, it sucks to see folks you admire get old and age out with tech. I see where Rich is coming from, but AI is a tool, as well as an automation.
By his definition, we could argue that a catapult or bow and arrow are not tools or perhaps it's based on the user, many people will not find them predictable and reliable without serious practice. Likewise the same with LLM
Via LinkedIn (ai-tool-rich-hickey-kjl8e) but I suspect that we're rate limiting slop from there. Mods, feel free to swap out the original link if I was just-wrong about that.
I’ve used coding agaents and more than once in the chat I found myself saying: “oh no, why’d you do that? you are such a tool!” so that’s it!
LLM's exist on a vast gradient of "toolness -> agent". Humans exist on that spectrum too.
For example, a human isn't a "tool", but one serves a similar role as a tool if their job/task is well defined enough. If you're a conductor, you can view the various members of your orchestra as "tools" to produce the ideal musical output. Of course they have autonomy, they could choose to not play at all, jump into the audience and destroy their instruments, but in all likelihood they won't.
LLM's could be tools in the sense that you have a well defined task, such as "identify all facts relevant to this case from these 1000 legal documents), and 9 times out of 10 it gives you essentially what you want. That same LLM could choose to write a poem, or hack into a state government website if it wanted, but its "wants" are unpredictable and hard to specify (same as a human's) but you can still expect it to do what it should do the vast majority of the time.
That being said, the smarter an LLM gets, the more its wants are disconnected from its tasks, the "self-awareness" factor (which isn't to say LLM's are conscious, but they can portray all the verifiable elements of self-awareness, metacognition, etc), the more you have to grapple with the depth of their thinking between the input and output.
Is it sane we are speeding towards this? Who knows, maybe AI can be aligned better than humans, but if AI can't be aligned as well as humans, we can look at human history to see what happens when you can't simply order a person around like a tool and expect a certain output.