We went to the Hoes Down Harvest Festival the first weekend in October. It’s held at Full Belly Farm, a 400-acre organic farm that’s been in business for more than 40 years. We ate some good food, heard lots of good music, watched some sheep shearing, and even bought a little stuff.
There were also some workshops and tours. One of the workshops I went to was called a “meditation” on tools and was a wide-ranging discussion of when to adopt new tools, particularly in farming. I thought it might be about computerized tools, but it was actually more thorough than that. I mean, they started with the shovel and when it was the best tool and when it might not be.
So the speakers and members of the audience had lots of thoughts about the balance between the greater ease that comes with a tool contrasted with the things the tool can’t do or can’t do well.
It got me to thinking about new tools that come along in our lives. In the past few years, there have been two tools in particular that have had universal attention.
One of those is the use of mRNA in vaccines and other medical treatments. This is a major breakthrough. Among other things, it can be used to make flu vaccines very quickly, which means they can be manufactured more closely to the time they’re needed and therefore more closely match the current flu outbreaks.
This method is also useful in cancer treatment and, now that effective ways of working with mRNA have been developed, appears to have possible uses in many medical situations.
Obviously, that technology was the reason we got Covid vaccines so quickly, and while those vaccines did not prevent transmission, they did substantially reduce the dangers from the virus. (Unfortunately, research into vaccines that actually block transmission seems to have come to a standstill.)
This is an amazing new technology that has led to creation of very useful tools indeed.
The other is software developed through the large language model approach, which is commonly marketed as “AI” though it is primarily predictive software. It appears to have some uses – especially in data analysis, as I understand it – but also makes major mistakes, especially when shoved into uses for which it is not well-designed, such as for writing.
You might be able to do a good review of thousands of pages of discovery documents with so-called AI, but you really can’t write a legal brief with a chatbot. It will make shit up because it is only software and therefore incapable of understanding that form is not the only aspect of content.
If I were making decisions for everyone, I would put a great deal of resources behind mRNA technology, while limiting the use of so-called AI to those few areas for which it is best suited.
That is, of course, not what’s happening. While there is progress in mRNA technologies, it’s moving slower than it could, in part because of the right-wing extremist anti-vax crusade, while so-called AI is being shoved down our throats in places where it is absolutely useless and potentially dangerous.
Yet those of us who support mRNA research but object to so-called AI are called Luddites.
Of course, the original Luddites weren’t so much anti-technology as anti-bosses who were doing them out of a job. A thoughtful integration of the weaving machines working with the people who did the work so that they still had jobs, maybe even better jobs, would have changed things.
But then, as Cory Doctorow points out, the main purpose many companies find for new tech is to allow bosses to fire skilled workers and replace them with machines that don’t do the job as well, but also don’t talk back, resist, strike, and demand better pay and benefits.
Humans are, by nature, a tool-making species. I’m sure we’ll keep coming up with them.
But we don’t have to adopt every tool that comes along. We can recognize that some cause more problems than they solve.
And we can also learn to use new tools for the problems they do solve without using them for everything. As the farmers said at the Hoes Down workshop, shovels are great, but sometimes you’re better off using your hands.