Humans use tools, never the reverse, a compass for the future
Technology has summoned a virgin continent over the horizon, and reason alone cannot navigate us through through the terrain of this new world.
We arrived twenty years ago, and began our exploration with the exuberance and arrogance of children - assuming our capacity to create and manipulate technology meant that we could understand and control it. As was developmentally inevitable, today we examine technology with the puerile hungers and fatalism of adolescence - we fantasize about it benefitting us personally, and conceptualize it as a force of nature - a wave to be ridden, its direction outside of our control. It is time for us to grow up - to cultivate the humility and principles of an adult.
For we must now see that the terrain of technology that lies ahead of us is not a small island to be cartographed and catalogued - but a continent of profound abundance, unimaginable danger, and completely unknown boundaries. In such foreign terrain we need not a map but a compass - a pointer toward the indelible; toward truths too sacred to be justified by reason, and values inexchangeable for lesser virtues.
For the first cornerstone of this project I volunteer the following: humans use tools, tools cannot use humans.
Software, a medium of infinite pliability, illuminates this distinction. When software is a tool, it can extend our capability, deepen our minds, and allows us to flex our volition. Tools empower the holder. They can be used for both constructive and destructive purposes - their use is not constrained by the maker, and does not serve any master but their wielder. Tools that enhance human capacity introduce risk but also profound possibility, beyond even the imagination of their manufacturer. A good tool allows every holder to extend themselves.
Other software constrains the volition of individuals - it surveils, addicts, and manipulates. It treats human minds, means, and messages as substrates for its manufacturer to control, squeeze, and engineer. It substitutes the shallow desires of the coder for the diverse aims, preferences, and values of the individuals that it purportedly serves. Such software reduces people to users - a dehumanization in vocabulary that provides cover for profound thefts.
We must call it so. We must scream it while we can. To capture the attention, distort the preferences of, or facilitate the addiction of another human is a theft. It steals not only time, money, and energy, but robs a person of the a defining element of their humanity - their agency. Software facilitates small crimes of this sort at unimaginable scale. We must decide that the small harm of billions is no less degrading to our common dignity than the immiseration or murder of few. Our creator endowed us with the pursuit of happiness, not to be traded away for trinkets of convenience, but as inalienable and inseparable right.
We must proclaim that we humans are actors - wielders of tools. We must reject attempts to blur the distinction between principal and agent, between men and machines. We must destroy systems of mechanized manipulation and coercion. We must develop the language, intuition, and zeal to reflexively defend our volition against a wide range of insidious and subtle threats.
Humans use tools. Tools may not use humans.
This is magnetic north. It is not a sufficient to navigate without error, and we will not always go straight toward it. But we have a compass.