Is AI a Tool?

The Changing Nature of Tools

Since the early days of humanity we have extended our capabilities through tools. Tools allow us to do things that the body alone cannot do, and in doing so extend the range of activity available to us.

A tool is something we use to extend our ability to do something. It is usually relatively 

specific: a hammer, a telescope, a calculator, a camera, a word processor. However, our tools have became increasingly capable, interconnected and involved in activities that were once distinctly human.

Technology is the broader system of knowledge, techniques, tools, processes and infrastructures through which humans make things and accomplish things. A hammer is 

a tool; metallurgy, manufacturing, construction techniques and the systems that produce 

and distribute hammers would be classified as technology.

So technology contains tools, but isn't synonymous with them. Historically, tools became increasingly embedded in technological systems. A stone axe is relatively understandable as an individual tool. A modern aircraft isn't really meaningful as a standalone tool, it depends on material science, engineering, software, manufacturing, airports, navigation systems, fuel infrastructure, and a multitude of supporting technologies.

And that becomes particularly important with AI. A model is a technological artefact, but the thing we call “AI” is much larger: models, data, computing infrastructure, interfaces, organisations, algorithms, human labour, energy systems and economic structures.

Over time, tools increasingly extended our senses and our capacity to preserve and transmit knowledge. Writing extended memory beyond the individual. Maps extended our ability to navigate and understand space. The printing press multiplied the reach of human knowledge. The telescope extended vision; the clock extended our ability to measure and organise time. These tools did not simply make existing activities faster, they changed what humans could perceive, remember, coordinate and understand.

The industrial age extended physical capability on an entirely different scale. Machines could amplify human strength, precision and speed, while factories allowed those capabilities to be organised collectively. Electricity transformed the scale and speed at which information and energy could move. The twentieth century then brought tools that increasingly extended mental capacities: calculators extended arithmetic, computers extended computation, databases extended memory and networks extended communication.

AI represents a further shift. Rather than simply extending a particular physical or cognitive capability, generative AI can produce outputs that resemble the products of human cognitive activity: language, images, music, code, explanations and ideas. The tool is no longer simply helping us perform an activity; it can participate in the activity itself.

This does not mean that AI has ceased to be a tool, nor that it has become a human mind. 

But it does change the relationship between tool and user. Earlier tools generally required us to provide the intention, knowledge and judgement while the tool extended our capacity to act. 

With the current technology suite that we call AI, some of those activities can be delegated, simulated or shared with the system. 

The question therefore becomes not simply what the tool can do, but which parts of human activity we choose to keep doing ourselves, which we choose to delegate, and what happens to our capabilities when we do?

Did Tools Become Technology?

The concept of technology gradually emerged as human technical activity became understood as a systematic body of knowledge and practice. From the nineteenth century onwards, technology increasingly became understood as a major force capable of transforming society itself. 

Our use of the word 'technology' is surprisingly recent in its modern sense.

The English word appears in the seventeenth century, from the Greek technologia, referring broadly to a systematic treatment or discussion of an art or craft. But it didn't initially relate

to the collection of machines and technical systems that we describe as 'technology' today.

The modern meaning developed mainly during the nineteenth century. As industrialisation accelerated, there was an increasing requirement for a word that described not just 

individual tools or crafts, but the organised body of technical knowledge and practices behind industrial production.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 'technology' had acquired something much closer to its contemporary meaning: the systematic application of knowledge and techniques to practical purposes, particularly through industry and engineering.

Technology became an increasingly important concept at roughly the same historical moment that Modernism emerged. The Industrial Revolution turned technical invention from a collection of individual crafts and tools into a major force that reorganised society.

Eventually, technology became more than a collection of machines and became, at points,

a digital environment.

These digital tools became increasingly capable, interconnected and involved in activities that were once distinctly human. Some tools extended what our bodies could do, others provided frameworks for information storage and dissemination. We categorised certain information as 'data' as we modified our perceptions of the world to take advantage of computational information processing.

The relationship between humans and tools has become progressively more intimate. 

Digital technologies increasingly mediate how we communicate, remember, navigate, work and understand the world. 

With the emergence of artificial Intelligence technology, we now participate in activities that were traditionally reserved for the realm of human cognition; generating language, images, explanations and suggestions. 

For the first time in human history, we are negotiating with our tools. We do so as we come to terms with the fact that a growing proportion of our personal and cultural conversations now only require one human being to be present.

So there's a conceptual progression worth making explicit:

Tools → things humans use to extend their capabilities.

Techniques → learned methods for doing things.

Technology → the organised knowledge, techniques, tools and systems through which those capabilities are developed and deployed.

And eventually, technology becomes something much bigger than the tools themselves: an environment in which we live.