The Tools Don’t Care

A hammer doesn’t really do anything. But you can do a lot of different things with a hammer. Some of the things you can do with a hammer are good for you, and some are good for other people. Some are good for both. Some of the things you could do with a hammer would be good for you, and bad for someone else. But the hammer doesn’t care, because it’s just a hammer.

Tools themselves don’t care how they’re used. Social media platforms don’t care if they makes you and your kids anxious and depressed any more than they care that they help you keep in touch with your family and friends on the other side of the world. The internet doesn’t care if it is used to exploit or if it is used to educate. AI chatbots don’t care if they’re used to deceive or delight. They’re just tools, at least for now. And they aren’t capable of caring.

It will be the people who make the tools and the people who use the tools. It will be the decision-makers, the trend-setters, and the culture creators. People will decide whether or not to care and what to care about.

People will decide whether to use the tools we have to get more, or to use them to make things better.