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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it, in America "it's just a tool" is shorthand for "guns should be regulated like hammers, i.e. barely at all, responsibility lies with the user not those who make, market and sell it"

Needless to say a lot of people disagree with that, because of the shootings. And internationally, a lot of societies regulate guns a great deal.

I'm not saying this to steer the conversation towards gun control, or to compare AI use to killing. Rather, I'm saying that the conversation here so far has has been confused because people have different ideas of what "it's just a tool" means, so they're talking at cross purposes.

To some it's an obvious statement of fact; almost everything man-made is a tool, AI is a tool like a pair of shoes or a guitar is a tool.

To others it's a statement that corporations should be held blameless, and access is a moral right that shoudn't be limited on consequentialist grounds.

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The analogy holds better if you compare the operators of AI services to the operators of gun services.

A shooting range, for example, must take reasonable care to prevent people from harming themselves or others: hearing protection, safety markings, lane dividers, a well-defined target area, backsplash protection, etc.

I'm not entirely against the "just a tool" interpretation of AI, as long as it's used to cover only the model (and maybe the weights) - an inert lump of code, rather than a public-facing inference service.

(I'm generally baffled by American gun culture, so perhaps it is possible there to recklessly operate an unsafe shooting range with impunity, but I doubt it...)

You’re not doing this but to your example: Guns don’t have numerous other positive use cases, so AI is simply not a fair comparison.

And in the case of AI, given the media environment the fact that it’s being used to save millions of hours doing back office automation is never covered.

So yes this is a prime argument for AI. It’s just a tool with a myriad of uses that no one covers cuz they’re boring.

As to the rest of the authors argument, obviously I’m aware of its myriad negative consequences but just disagree that banning matrix math or NIMBY-ying warehouses where matrix math happens is somehow a solution to those problems.

You want to talk about policy fixes at the level of applications, I’m all ears.

> Guns don’t have numerous other positive use cases, so AI is simply not a fair comparison.

They may not have numerous positive use cases, but the one where they save your life is a pretty good one. People who live where police are nearby don't appreciate how different things are out in the country.

Digression, but gun laws (or lack thereof) apply equally to cities where most people live and where guns wreck most of their havoc and cities are banned from passing any laws to help fix. Different issue entirely.

In fact this kind of case-by-case handling is exactly what I’m asking for in AI as opposed to blanket laws.

I appreciate that they can save lives in cities/suburbs as well. I was just pointing out that an item does not need to have "numerous" positive use cases to counterbalance downsides. It is sufficient to have one sizable positive use case, which firearms do have. People who live in proximity to police may not feel this way, but people who live out in the country tend to have a different take (popular saying: when seconds count, the sheriff is minutes away).

No case-by-case handling can negate the energy costs and other side effects of datacenters, for instance. Your arguments are sophistry.

Energy costs are a function of energy supply. We have infinite energy being beamed down to us everyday. Using energy as a cudgel to suppress demand and deflate economic growth is the real sophistry.

It's NIMBY all the way down. Murica...

"NIMBY-ying warehouses where matrix math happens is somehow a solution to those problems"

You think the opposition to the datacenters is an effort to sop AI? ffs.

> As I understand it, in America "it's just a tool" is shorthand for "guns should be regulated like hammers, i.e. barely at all, responsibility lies with the user not those who make, market and sell it"

You're partially right about the responsibility part, but I think the rest is going too far. The phrase is a direct response to media and gun control advocates who treat the existence of guns as the cause of crime instead of the people using the gun.

> To others it's a statement that corporations should be held blameless, and access is a moral right that shoudn't be limited on consequentialist grounds.

The old, what is better for the rich VS what is better for society.

I think another important parallel between guns and AI is that the people who say "it's just a tool" are discounting all the cultural context. Additionally and anecdotally, they tend to be the people who are most connected to that cultural element.

A gun is just a tool except it's also a symbol of countless things within American culture: freedom and independence and even masculinity sometimes. It's bound up with various cultural tropes and narratives that mean it's only a tool in the same way that Mjǫllnir is only a hammer.

Similarly, we have literally centuries of cultural context to the idea of thinking machines, and it is a tool, but a lot of the people saying that also think it's their girlfriend or god or just something that will entirely upturn society and remove [entire class of people].

"It's just a tool" is accurate but disingenuous, knowingly or not. There's a lot more bound up in a gun or AI than there is in a can opener.

But we regulate lots of tools. Cars are tools, you still need a license.

I'm fully pro gun control. I still think guns are instrinsically tools, neither inherently good nor evil. They are still dangerous and should be regulated as such just like any dangerous tool.

If a gun is just a tool, is an atom bomb just a tool?

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