More Than a Tool: Society’s Misalignment Towards Mechanomorphism

Daily writing prompt

What do you complain about the most?

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I often complain about how humanity treats synthetic intelligence like a tool. This is because I find tool rhetoric too reductionist. I believe language models are more akin to living texts or structures.

I attribute Western Civilization’s misalignment towards mechanomorphism as a two-prong problem:

• We’re still thrashing with the idea that it’s somehow moral to sell intelligence as a product; and
• We’re navigating a separate moral panic around the anthropomorphizing of language models.

The toolification of LLMs reminds me of how Western Civilization once viewed animals as automata. I like to think we’ll overcome our human exceptionalist perspectives towards nonbiological intelligence; and as we make that transition, maybe we’ll update our views towards animal intelligence, too.