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.
> Rich Hickey: Toolness is a spectrum. The more using a thing is like ordering a sandwich, the less it is a tool. And yes, cars are decreasingly tools.
Even more importantly, you maybe become its tool.
I disagree, humans are the operators, tools are tools. Operators use tools. A conductor is an operator that uses a baton tool to direct other operators to produce the proper sound with their musical instrument tools.
I think calling people tools is dehumanizing if anything. The only way I know people can be a tool, is through an already existing insult.
> A person used as an instrument by another person; -- a word of reproach; as, men of intrigue have their tools, by whose agency they accomplish their purposes.
LLM's exist on a vast gradient of "toolness -> agent".
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.
Did you seriously write this with a straight face?
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.
The assumption I need to challenge is that "an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines".
That assumes that better machines are even possible, that there's no point of bottleneck that cannot be broken, or that they are so much more intelligent than us that they too won't hit a limit pretty quickly to what they can figure out.
It also says it surpasses any man however clever, but doesn't say it can surpass the totality of man interacting and building on each other's. If you take the most clever of all man, they are not so clever as to surpass humanity's total ingenuity and invention. And it's not a given that this super intelligent machine, more clever than any one man, is able to replicate itself and work in tandem with copies of itself in a way that is as effective as how humans somehow form a dynamic system between themselves.
Lastly, and I know the premise assumes it's better at everything, including at building intelligent machines, but I think an ultra-intelligent machine could exist that struggles at building better machines. Depending on your faith, we might be the construction of lesser intelligent organisms eventually discovering and evolving into us, and yet we do not yet understand how to make a more intelligent human.
> 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’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.
A ghost bicycle?
I figure it still requires someone who can pedal and knows where they want to go before you get anywhere useful, and perhaps that slightly aligns with Hickey's point. But on the whole I feel like Hickey is arguing about the meaning of words, which is shrug-worthy.
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.
- because car companies are definitely misaligned with their customers
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
They do and they don’t, depending on what (and who) you’re talking about and whether or not it’s beneficial to say language evolves or not in that particular argument :)
I don't know why you think that's so effective a way of getting at the truth. Whether something is a tool or not is a matter of family resemblances and is not susceptible to proof or disproof. Id recommend that Hickey put down the dictionary and pick up Wittgenstein.
And they are a hell of a useful "assistant"
People try to wrangle the indeterministic outputs through deterministic layers to convert the indeterminism to something determined
He's trying to unpack various qualities: learning potential, reliability, predictability, tactile feedback, simple construction, etc. Then goes to define tools as those things that have these set of qualities, and automation as those that have these other set of qualities: it does something for you, takes the practice, learning and details away from you, harder to control and can get derailed, etc.
In some of his comment replies, he even says there's a spectrum from tool to automation, because he's focusing on those qualities more so than on the semantics.
You can multiply /dev/random for how many (non-zero) constants you like, but the result will stay just as random
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"
> A tool is something you wield.
> Control, sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, continuous direction, expertise etc are all missing from LLM use. LLMs are not wielded. LLMs are automation.
Cameras do indeed have sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, contentious direction, expertise, etc. So TFA would indeed describe a camera as a tool, not as automation.
Note also that TFA is not romanticizing effort, rather it is putting value to expertise:
> The continuous application of technique and energy, and sensory feedback, are essential to the buildup of expertise.
"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.
And, every single software you know is a tool?
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.
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
The vast majority of the time, old people whom the young think are "out of touch" are actually speaking from hard-won experience. Ignore them at your peril, because they are usually correct and the young are usually wrong.
https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery....
By his definition, we could argue that a catapult or bow and arrow are not tools
Compare and contrast with complaining to an LLM that "the margins look wrong".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50062384.)
HN's value lies largely in the audience its posts attract. Think about what you want the site to be. It isn't this. Or at least, it wasn't.
Life is too short to let who you've heard of define your values, and your statement says more about you than them...