alt Hacker NewsA tool that is capable of moralizing at you or making decisions, is clearly not just a tool. I get that people want to keep the locus of accountability on humans, but insisting that coding agents are "just tools" is confusion.
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When does a tool become "not just a tool"? Is there a complexity limit to what it can do before it becomes "more than a tool"?
If you had a tool that ONLY moralized on decisions, would that still be just a tool? Is the issue that it both does something else AND moralizes that is the issue?
I don't necessarily disagree that I personally don't want my tools to moralize, I don't know if that makes them categorically different or just a tool I don't want.
Yep, thinking LLMs are just a tool just isn't a good mental model of what's occurring.
Of course HN has a pretty large number of people that say things like "But I want the nuclear weapon building machine to do whatever I want without asking questions, and there are no possible wide scale ramifications that will happen because of this".
These AI models are something new and different and we need to change our expectations of them over conventional software.
Every tool is /inherently/ moralistic. Full stop. The idea that a tool could not have an embedded morality in it is a fiction.