1
There's no such thing as Just a Tool | deadSimpleTech
deadsimpletech.comHeidegger thinks about tools like so: a tool is something (a thing that has being in the Heideggerian sense, not necessarily an object) that represents an extension of human capabilities in some way. A tool is thus any kind of thing that *lets you do something you wouldn't otherwise have been able to*. The important (for us) conceptual leap here is that when a tool works well, or isn't broken, it develops what Heidegger describes as a "ready-to-hand" quality: the tool fades into the background as a kind of human-tool gestalt of a human with the additional capability afforded by a tool forms. As a simple example of this, consider eating with a fork. When the fork is well-designed and not broken, *you don't explicitly have "I am using a fork" in your conscious mind while eating dinner*.



I meant easier to do the bad thing than to do the good thing. A hammer does not specifically make it easier to attack someone than to use it for carpentry. And hammers are rarely used to attack other people in practice.
I don’t understand why you bring guns into this argument. Like LLMs, they should indeed be banned, except for some very narrow use cases. Most developed countries do ban guns in that way.
For most people, LLMs do make it specifically easier to skip learning than to enhance learning. We can see this in practice where teachers are noticing higher grades for homework but lower grades for the final exams.
To take it to the extreme: you could say buying a lottery ticket can be both a bad and a good financial decision because it costs money, but it can also earn you a lot of money. That statement is technically true, but I hope you agree it is misleading.