I expected to find the following techno-critic arguments in this blog post, but did not really find them. Here they are, Hacker News!

[Tools do not exist in the void but in a society]. You can't study tools without studying the context that created it. Some tools work in some society, some others don't. One example, IIRC, are Ski-Doo with some native population that have Potlatch-like practices. Some anthropologist gave them Ski-Doo but you have to sacrifice something precious to give back, and soon they had to be burnt. In our society, anything expensive that require maintenance and repair is a bad fit as both "don't have the time" and the skills. We prefer "disposable" objects at the cost we know. That argument alone also explain why if both Switzerland and USA have the same amount of guns per inhabitant, they are less gun murder in Switzerland than in USA: different societies, with different culture, with different level of poverty, with different actors, etc.

[Tools create potentials, society may realize them]. As hackers, we often like to create new potentials (eg. with Bluesky ATProto, or the anonymous Vuvuzela chat, etc.). We also envisioned that with electricity, then with 3D printing, that people would build many objects of their daily life directly at home. But, from all the created technologies, some potentials are realized, some not. Community Memory, a San-Fransisco pre-Internet electronic board, wrote that more often the potentials that favor people in power in our society are realized. That's Palantir - strong - business model.

[Tools convey intentions]. I said above that tools create potentials. These potentials are not limited to what the tool actually is, but it should encompass all the micro-choices made by ones creating it. To illustrate this idea, take a knife. Knife designed to cook on one side, and knife designed for hunting in the other side, do not look the same. Youtube, by not displaying a big bar telling you how much you already uploaded to their server convey the idea of an infinite storage space, etc. Additionally to the raw utility of your tool, you can convey ideas, intentions, suggestion, affordance, either consciously or unconsciously. Back to guns in Switzerland & USA, both how people get the gun, what are the narrative, what the guns look like, whether or not you personalize it, etc. has a huge impact too.

[Our tools maximize efficiency at the expense of everything else]. Efficiency, in this case, could be defined as reaching a specific goal, in a stable & defined context. The critics of efficiency improvement are multiple: often, what really matter is to reach an acceptable threshold on many many different goals. Additionally, most efficiency gain make the process more and more dependent of a stable defined context, each micro-change in the environment and the whole tool / production chain is disrupted. It could be summarized as the opposition between "industry" and "craft". It's also one argument of the luddite: they also had tools to build cloth, that were less optimized in term of speed to build a cloth, and harder to master. But on other goals, that were not considered at that time, like quality, they were better. They thought the better quality of their cloth will save them, when people will find how poor quality are the cloths made by the new automated machine. But it did not happen. Still, from a French perspective, crafts still exist there; it's what luxury brand sells, because rich people know how much better they are. William Morris experimented and published a lot on these topics, it's an interesting reference.

With the 4 ideas (tools do not exist in the void, tools create only potentials, tools convey intentions, we build tools to maximize efficiency only), I think we have some basis to build a stimulating critic of both AI, cars, and knife. But this part is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

People interested in these topics may read Ivan Illich, André Gorz, or Jacques Ellul.