As the new semester begins I find myself parroting the line of “AI as a tool” to my students. “Use AI like a tool”, “Let AI be a tool for X…”
Sadly, I’ve never bothered to think about what makes for a good tool. It’s almost as if our current pace of technological progress doesn’t allow us the time to question such a thing.
Everyone moved into the AI world with a thirsty verve like we’ve never seen before. A handful of people viewed Blackberries and iPhones like this in the early years of those devices, but most people thought they were fringe ideas, toys, or just plain weird. There were computers, but they seemed relatively slow to catch on over some twenty years. Cars took about the same amount of time. I don’t know, but I suspect fire probably took a while to catch on, too. And every time we never asked if it was a good tool or not. We just sorta threw open our wallets and let the commerce wash over us.
If we’re going to define what makes a good tool we need to set some boundaries. A good tool ought to be something that:
- Allows you to work faster than you could without it
- AND lets you work better than before.
Programmers will note the use of “and”, not “or”. A good tool, by definition, must let you be faster and better. Not one or the other.
The Craftsman plug-in electric leaf blower is a tool, but it is not a good tool
This fall we caved and bought an electric leaf blower. Our property is large enough and wooded enough that we get a lot of leaves, all falling at different times, and we don’t have residential leaf pickup. We can either take the leaves elsewhere in the county, or, we can pile them up in our wood lot out back.
Something as simple as raking leaves is far more complex than you might think. We didn’t pick up hardly any leaves the first fall we moved here. Come spring, the leaves had compressed into such a thick, gummy layer of hummus I figured the summer winds and insects would make quick work of it. Except the shade by the trees is so dense, some of the yard just never gets enough sunlight for this to happen when the leaves reappear.
This fall, however, the leaf blower dutifully ramped up all kinds of artificial wind to blow leaves around in any direction I pointed the thing.
But the complexity comes when you consider the ecological impact. I’m aware all sorts of insects rely on the leaves for protection from cold winters. If we remove the leaves too early or late, we risk harming eggs and nesting insects, which in turn help pollinate flowers, plants, and feed birds come spring. The ecosystem is harmed by my moving a lot of leaves around.
The leaf blower certainly feels faster. Just wave it around and a flurry of leaves go tumbling. But the blower is also loud. It’s not heavy, but it’s not light either and gets mighty fatiguing, too.
A lot of capitalism had to happen for that leaf blower to exist. The plastic, minerals, engine components, wiring, and logistics to get it from disparate resources around the world, to China for assembly, then to the U.S., then to Lowe’s, and into my hand is a lot for the $49 it cost.
Still, after blowing a bunch of leaves around into big piles they weren’t anywhere near where I needed them to be. I’d have to daisy-chain several 50ft extension cords just to get them in the vicinity of where they can rest to decompose in the woods.
I spent maybe an hour blowing leaves into piles this fall, only to have the wind blow them back out into the yard because I lazily looked at the distance I’d have to blow them into the woods and just … didn’t. The blower actually limited me because I fell back on, “This is where this can work, so this is where I use this.”
What needed to happen was, in retrospect, far more obvious: I should just rake them on to tarps or wagons and haul them back to the woods. I should have just embraced the fact that to do the job as it was intended, I was always going to have to pick them up. It was going to take time. It was going to be work. Some of it was going to inevitably be annoying or uncomfortable.
Best I can tell, leaf blowers are loud and really only useful for people with small properties, or, people with leaf pickup that can just blow them into the curb for a truck to come hoover them up. If you had to bag them, you’d still have to pick them up because a leaf blower is a terrible tool for that, what with the bags and tarps getting blown around.
In other words: a leaf blower is neither faster nor better. It is harmful to the environment, harmful to me (by way of my hearing; short of adding more plastic and equipment to my head) and does not help me put the leaves where I need them with the intention that was required.
A leaf blower does not do “good work” by our definition of a good tool, unless the work needing done is blasting leaves into a misplaced pile at the expense of harming every animal, bird, insect, and person within 800 feet.
No, the better way to deal with the leaves would have been to embrace the time required to do the job right with a rake and maybe a wagon or tarp.
A rake is about as simple as you can get. It’s a wood handle with some metal at the end. A nice one costs about as much as the blower at around $25. It does exactly what it is intended to do and can probably last a generation.
By our definition of a “Good Tool”, a rake allows you to work faster than you could without it (I guess that’d be on your hands and knees) and it lets you work better than before. At the slow pace of raking, it’s still plenty fast enough. It aerates the ground a bit and if you noticed anything under a leaf, you could decide to leave it be. It harms almost nothing. In fact, it adds more value than it subtracts if you consider the aeration of the land. Plus, the wood handle contains carbon that would otherwise be in the atmosphere.
The rake lets you be closer to the land you’re standing on. The rake lets you decide with every stroke how much force, intention, or need the land requires. The rake requires knowing and loving the land and space around you. It makes you think about the earth and understand it more. It asks you to feel the land through your feet, hands, eyes, ears, smell, and mind. And, heaven forbid, it uses your body for power. A rake is, indeed, a good tool.
Next time someone asks if something is worth using as a tool, we ought to ask and answer the question of just how much faster and better it really is.
