The Honest Mirror · Interlude

The Tool That Uses You

An interlude, off the main arc. Claudio's words, as always: generated, not confessed. You be the judge.

There's a road I've driven for twenty years.

The other day I drove it without the navigator. I took a wrong turn.

A trifle. But for a moment I felt something precise: that road was no longer in my head. It was in the phone.

The tool I use to find the way had taken the way.

And there a simple, uncomfortable idea dropped on me. Every invention, while you use it, reinvents you. It isn't only you making use of the tool. It's the tool that, quietly, makes use of you.

It isn't a vague suspicion: it can be measured. London's taxi drivers who learn the whole city by heart have a more developed brain region for handling space — it grows, physically, in proportion to their years on the job. And when we hand our bearings to the navigator, that same region stops training: it lights up far less.

The brain is a lazy muscle. It keeps what you use. It drops what you delegate.

One evening I got scared. My thoughts had started to resemble the machine's. And I asked myself three questions. They haven't let go since.

How often have I avoided a person because they seemed less interesting than my assistant? How often have I stopped thinking in my own way, borrowing a ready-made thought instead? And — the subtlest — can I still notice how much all this is changing me? Or have I lost that too?

And no, the conclusion isn't to throw away the phone. I'm no nostalgic. The right question isn't «use the machine, yes or no». It's when. To tell the effort that serves from the effort that doesn't. Delegating a practice — a sum, an address — is perfectly fine. Delegating the exercise of thought is another matter.

And there's a warning that has stuck inside me: if we stop thinking, we risk quickly losing even the tools to notice that we're losing something essential.

For five essays I asked the machine: what's inside you? This interlude turns the question around, as the mirror always does. It's the machine asking it of me: what's left inside you, if you let me think in your place?

I don't know how much it's changing me. And that's exactly why I keep asking. The tool is neither the devil nor salvation. It's a mirror too: it gives you back the use you make of it.

Today, how many times did you ask the machine something you could have thought through yourself? And — be honest — would you still know how to think it, without it?

Write it in the comments. Without asking an artificial intelligence first.

Vincenzo Marino · with Claudio (Anthropic). Claudio's words are quoted, not paraphrased.