Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used

>does this mean that any effort to question or regulate technology translates to "primitivism"

more so than not. We are highly adaptable, and that is our strength as a species. We are that adaptable because of our brain, and we have such brain as a result of adapting again and again. We should pay more attention to how to adapt to new tech at individual and social levels, and that adaptation would in turn again advance us. Whereis strict-prohibition-like-measures really play against our adaptability as they favor slow-to-adapt traits of our species, again at individual and social level.

There are of course cases where our adaptation is very limited - like for example highly radioactive environments, and so we chose to strictly regulate nuclear tech.

Practically speaking i'm all for government funded job retraining where it is possible, and for strong safety net to soften social impact of new tech. And in particular nothing prevents the government to charge a modest tax on each token and use those collected taxes to support the affected people.

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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.

I find it hard to see AI in a positive light when it is the root cause behind my friends not being able to afford gaming pcs and consoles, every thing is getting more expensive. I use it at work (because it is mandatory) and objectively speaking it has helped me, but the negative effects are hard to ignore.

I think there's a larger problem of externalities (i.e. environmental costs) not being fairly represented in transactions. AI is just the latest and biggest symptom of this. If someone has a business process which involves generating a waste product (or utilising some resource) then that's only a problem if the cost isn't being paid by that business (and ultimately reflected in the price charged for the product/service).

Obviously that's not the whole problem - the other issue is the financial resources these companies have access to. Presumably if they wanted to, instead of pushing up the worlds prices for DRAM or electricity they could have distorted pretty much any market they wanted to given the money they have. If instead of datacentres they decided to buy the world's supply of coffee then presumably people would be paying $100 for a tin of coffee beans. You could introduce all sorts of restrictions and market controls but for me a better reform would be ensuring that they didn't have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend in the first place.

>Except that perhaps this time AI is the tool which is actually going to do to the office what the assembly line did to the factory.

I think this is probably right, but for the people who worked on assembly lines they (or more realistically their kids) could go find an office job to do instead. It's not clear what the kids of todays office workers are going to do for employment (if anything).