I recently spent an excellent two days at the first Teaching and Learning with AI in Europe conference, organised by Breda University of Applied Sciences and the University of Central Florida, so first I want to say a big thank you to everyone who helped organize the event, those who presented and also to all those who talked with me, thank you for the interactions and thinking. There were a few things that were raised in the panel session that we did not have time to really explore and that I have been pondering since the event and so I have decided to write that up as a way of thinking these things through.

Why I do not agree that AI is “just a tool”

In the response to the very first question to the panel it was said that AI was ‘just a tool’ and that position was shared pretty well by the rest of the panel except me, so I would like in this post to explain more fully than time allowed, why I do not share this view but instead think that AI is a technology in which we all participate.

In my initial response I mentioned how AI is shaping society and how we interact with it and each other, how the tendency to anthropomorphize means we often, for example, thank it for help, where we would not do that with a hammer and I am aware that this comment did get a few laughs and also nods of agreement. I think I mentioned briefly Heidegger. But there was of course not time to really get into fully explaining any of this in detail.

The hammer

So, to start with the hammer, and anthropomorphism. AI is designed to encourage a relationship with the humans who use it, in some cases it is named, and the entire design of our interaction invites us to see it as a person. This is the basis of the Turing test after all; can we reliably tell whether we are talking to a human or a machine? Current AI design is to make it harder for us to be able to tell. This is a commercial choice to shape how we think and engage with it. Traditional tools are not designed in this way. Further, the talk from AI firms of consciousness and needing to protect them from possibly harmful interactions with humans reinforces that position.

To dig deeper into my use of hammer and mention of Heidegger, he was trying to show that technologies were not just a means to an end but in fact reveal what things are and what they are for. They enframe things and his concern was that this enframing was showing the world to be a ‘standing reserve’ – in other words, things to be used. Calling AI just a tool is thus just the sort of enframing that Heidegger was warning us about.

Tools and technologies

I want to add that I think that there is a difference between tools and technologies. Here I am drawing on ideas and work by Brian Arthur and Jon Dron. A tool is something we use, technology is an orchestration of phenomena to achieve some purpose. We humans often are a part of that orchestration. So, I use my hammer as part of the orchestrations of phenomena to assemble an Ikea wardrobe, the hammer is part of a technology that includes me. Dron calls the human part of this orchestration, where we flexibly improvise and judge as we go, soft technique. Hard technique, by contrast, is the mechanical, routine, the scripted. Machines have been able to do hard technique for a long time, but AI is arguably the first widely available technology that can do soft technique and that is important. It writes, it evaluates and it converses, a screwdriver, a hammer and a calculator never did that.

Not neutral

I mentioned that AI does things to us. The panel did not disagree with that point, but argued that it does these things as a tool. I disagree because using the word tool frames AI as neutral, and it is certainly not. Here I am drawing on work by Neil Selwyn among others. Tools do things, technologies do things and do things to us. These technologies are being embedded into other technologies so that they do not only shape us but start to shape our other technologies. If we frame AI as merely a tool then we are hiding this and framing some sort of neutrality that is not real because it carries, embedded in its very design, the beliefs and values of the industry and people who built it. Those cannot be removed.

Those assumptions about the use of data, about efficiency, about infrastructure, about what counts as knowledge, or what counts as valuable, are all there in the technology. This makes it political and social in ways that are often obscured when we describe AI merely as a tool.

References

Arthur, W. B. (2009). The nature of technology: What it is and how it evolves. Free Press.

Dron, J. (2023). How education works: Teaching, technology, and technique. AU Press.

Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1954)

Selwyn, N. (2016). Is technology good for education? Polity Press.

Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433–460.