Is AI a tool or are you?

The "AI is a tool" line gets thrown around so often it's background noise. Hilarius Bookbinder thinks we should sit with that claim for a minute. In a new essay, Bookbinder points out that philosophers have spent almost no time defining what a tool even is. Martin Heidegger is the rare exception. He described two ways we relate to tools. "Readiness-to-hand" is when you're fluent with something, like eyeglasses or a keyboard, and it disappears from conscious awareness. You're not thinking about the tool. You're just thinking through it. "Presence-at-hand" is when you examine the tool as an object, like learning a bandsaw and paying attention to every move.

Bookbinder proposes a baseline definition: a tool is something that increases your personal agency. A rake counts. You're still the one raking, but it's faster and easier. A Rube Goldberg machine doesn't count because it's so inefficient it actually reduces your agency. The uncomfortable question is whether AI fits. Does it make you more capable, or does it slowly hollow out your judgment and skill until you're just rubber-stamping whatever the model suggests? This mirrors the recent warnings in Microsoft's Copilot terms that the AI is "for entertainment purposes only" and categorizes outputs as non-professional opinion rather than actionable advice.

Then the essay takes a wild turn into evolutionary biology. Richard Dawkins flipped the traditional view of natural selection by looking at it from the gene's perspective: genes build organisms to copy themselves. Patrick Bateson mocked this by saying, fine, then nests make birds to make more nests. Bookbinder takes the joke seriously. Maybe AI systems are the nests, and we're the birds, building behaviors that perpetuate the AI. That sounds paranoid. Then you read about a university Provost breathlessly promoting "vibe coding" and Google AI certificates with no critical thought at all, and it gets harder to dismiss. This feels similar to the Hacker News thread collecting forgotten AI scandals, which highlights the controversies that get buried under constant product launches and hype.