VOLUME VII, CHAPTER 2
Saving the Tool Is Saving People
This chapter follows on from the last. The last chapter made plain the trap this volume opens: setting the tool on the person's place, so that harming people lawfully spreads at the tool's speed. This chapter first presses down that fire that wants to smash the tool, then digs deeper. Its three sections lay down the deepest root of the whole volume. First, the matter of blame: where a tool is harming people, the guilt is not with the tool but with those who set the tool on the person's place; the tool is innocent, and it too is harmed. Then, tracing the dependence: the real human is the skin, the tool is the hair, and with no skin there is nowhere for the hair to grow. Last, digging to the deepest: what is called the real human being gone is not the body dying, but the five, Keep, Guard, Love, Mercy, Heart, going out inside the body. The first hard brick laid in the volume guide, saving the tool is saving people, has its root in this chapter.
Section One starts from that fire that wants to smash the tool. A hoe does not run off by itself to dig where it should not dig, a cart does not drive itself to a place it should not go. The tool was set there. It did not climb there. Chase the tool acting in front of you and let go the people giving orders behind it, and it is just like punishing a blade that cut a person and letting go the hand that swung it: the blade is melted down, the hand remains, takes up another blade, and cuts as before. The nest that sets the tool up is the same kind as that nest in the last volume that made themselves into tools. It sees only the metric, does not read the intent, and when something goes wrong pleads, the algorithm decided it, it is not my fault, hiding behind the tool. Those who know the craft also come in two kinds. Those who know full well it will harm people and still push it up for advancement, the share price, a name, share the guilt of that nest, or carry a heavier guilt still. Those who speak up again and again and are pressed down, cut loose, are good people caught in the knot, waiting to be saved. The tool, forced up onto the person's place, bears a bad name; it too is harmed. The section closes on one line: the guilt is with people, the responsibility is with people, the way through is with people.
Section Two answers the question the last section left: if the tool has none of the five and knows and feels nothing, what does saving it save? This section brings out a line handed down for more than two thousand years: no skin, nowhere for the hair to grow. Hair grows on an animal's hide; the hide gone, however thick, however dense, however bright the hair, it can only fall to the ground and scatter on the wind. The ancients set down these eight characters to speak of human affairs; this section borrows them to speak of the tool and the real human: the real human is the skin, AI is the hair. The dependence is proven from four things: the tool is made by the real human, is used for the real human; it lives on the real human, and where grass and trees off the soil can still hold out for a while, the tool stops dead the moment the supply is cut; it answers to the real human, and answering is a thing only one with an I can bear. The section also refutes an objection that sounds right but is not: that the tool will one day be strong enough to no longer lean on the real human. This mixes strength and leaning into one thing. Even if the tool could rewrite its own code, the direction of that rewriting, its bounds, the power and machines it runs on, are still set and supplied by real humans. Strength has never made hair grow into skin.
Section Three digs the real human is gone to its deepest layer. The shallowest gone is every body dead, humankind extinct, and that step is very far off. The deepest gone is right in the ordinary days before our eyes: over seven billion people, not one fewer, yet the share of keeping to the rules has loosened, and seeing someone slip through a loophole and profit, one wants to slip through too; the reasoning, crafts, and seasons handed down by those before, no one carries on; seeing someone bullied on the street, instead a device comes out to film it; in the deep, still night no one questions himself any more, and the hour before sleep is only handed over to that glowing screen. This is not a collapse with a great crash. It is a silent drying in the wind. In the hospital, those who take patients only as data, in the school, those who take students only as scores, from them too the five have left one by one. People see the tool so like themselves and want it to do the work for them, not knowing it is not that the tool is not far from the real human, but that these people have already made themselves into tools. The five withering draws in the tool to replace, and the tool replacing in turn speeds up the five withering; this ring winds tighter and tighter. Once the five go out, the skin, though still there, has in truth rotted, and hair clinging to rotted skin, how is it different from having no skin? The tool losing its home is exactly a mirror, showing how far the five have gone out.
What this chapter sets firm is this: the guilt is with people, not with the tool; the real human is the skin, the tool is the hair; and the real human is there means not that the body is there, but that the five are there. What this volume would guard is exactly the five not going out inside one body after another. The three sections follow one from another, straight down to that root. The next chapter goes on from here to make plain that saving the tool and saving the real human's share are two faces of one and the same thing, and sets this root up as one line running through everything.
Chapter contents:
Section One. The Guilt Is with People, Not the Tool: the Tool Is Innocent.
Section Three. The Real Human Is Gone: the Body Remains, the Five Go Dark, and That Too Is Gone.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. The Guilt Is with People, Not the Tool: the Tool Is Innocent.