"Whoever Uses Machines Does His Work Like a Machine"

The Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool has a workbench on the playground. This is the place where "real" tools are used, which is to say hammers, saws, screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, glue guns, sanders, and other classic hand tools. 

The rest of the playground is a loose parts paradise in which the children are free to manipulate, transport, combine, and dismantle whatever they find, according to their curiosity, with the caveat that an adult will step in if that threatens to harm themselves or someone else. (Our landlord also expects us to be protective of the building.) But the workbench is something else. If you step into the workbench area, the adult will often expect you to wear protective eyewear. You can use the tools to make whatever you want, often involving objects you find on the wider playground, but you are expected to use the tools for their intended purpose.

Hammers are for driving and prying out nails . . . If you want to smash something, you use a mallet.

Screwdrivers are for tightening and turning screws . . . If you want to stab something, you use a knife or a pick or an awl.

Saws are for cutting wood . . . If you want to have a sword fight, you'll have to find some sticks.

Tools are not uniquely human, but our capacity for creating and using tools is unsurpassed in the animal kingdom. Indeed, nearly everything we do in our lives involves using a tool. We drink coffee from a tool called a mug. We take notes with a tool called a pencil. We cook dinner with tools called pots and pans. Our world is full of machines, fancier tools, from automobiles to televisions to computers, all of which are designed for a purpose or purposes. We create tools to extend ourselves into the world in increasingly powerful ways. From the earliest cutting and grinding tools of our most ancient ancestors to the machine intelligences and screen-based technologies that we carry in our pockets, the story of tools is the story of humankind.

One of the stories we tell ourselves about our tools and machines is that they represent progress. We say that we're grateful that we don't have to, say, carry our laundry down to the river the way they did in the olden days. We don't think we'd like to live without running water and HVAC systems and coffee makers. We could do it, of course, but why?

Then we wonder why we're soft in the middle, why we're anxious, and why, with all this progress, we still have to find ways to motivate ourselves to get out of bed in the morning. We join a gym because we don't get enough exercise out of our natural lives. We waste chunks of our lives seeking for something like human connection as we doom scroll or binge watch. The machines and tools are supposed to free us up for more important things . . . But we struggle to figure out what's more important.

There is an ancient Chinese Taoist parable about an old gardener who is painstakingly watering his fields by hand. A passerby suggests using a simple mechanical device called a levered well sweep that would make the work go faster and easier.

"Then anger rose up in the old man’s face, and he said, “I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things (machines); I am ashamed to use them." (From The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan)

Tools and machines may increase our efficiency, but they also, inevitably, reshape the human spirit, turning life into a kind of mechanical routine, which, I assert, is part of the reason so many of us find ourselves vaguely, or even pointedly, dissatisfied in the modern world.

I am not anti-technology any more than I am anti-hammer, but every tool changes us for better or worse, and it's therefore important to use our tools consciously: to use them for the proper purpose. Most of the time, our new tools are about making tasks faster or easier, but efficiency cannot always be our North Star. Education, in particular, is not improved through efficiency. That is a matter for commerce and manufacturing. But learning is about thinking and our current computer/screen based technologies tend to thwart actual thinking by robbing us of wonder. When I hear ed-tech evangelists touting their latest "innovation," I'm reminded of Abraham Maslow's famous quote, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."

I like keeping an eye on the birds that hang out near my home. Several years ago, I noticed that the local ravens habitually fly in a flock (an unkindness to use the so-called proper term) westward about 15 minutes before sunrise. At first I thought that maybe a local business, like a bakery, tossed it's day-old food into an open dumpster every morning, but had to dismiss the theory when daylight savings time rolled around that the ravens continued their behavior. If humans were involved it would be according to clock time rather than orbital time. Every morning as the ravens passed by, I wondered about them. They didn't seem to have any particular urgency about their mini-migration. It didn't include all the ravens, because I spied others hanging out in trees. There weren't ravens flying in from every direction as if they were descending on a specific destination. It was just a general westward movement by a subset of ravens. Why were there sometimes more and fewer in the flock? Why was it connected to sunrise? Every day, I looked for clues, hints, and ideas, spending a few minutes each morning wondering about it. It was a purely intellectual activity.

I finally began to settle on an explanation that delighted me. I imagined a local ur raven from centuries ago that developed an irrational fear of the sun as it rose over the horizon in the east. Too bright! Too hot! What the hell is that thing? So it would, each morning, attempt to run away to the west. Before long, other ravens joined it, not out of fear, but because this one raven, maybe in other contexts a respected leader, seemed to "know" something. Now, centuries later, they are still doing it as a kind of cultural tradition.

This is something I've been contemplating almost every morning for several years. I recently, however, made the mistake of asking an AI about it. I still see those ravens most mornings, but their behavior no longer fills me with curiosity and wonder because I have "the answer." Like that ancient gardener, I'm ashamed that I used a machine. Now when I see that flock overhead, I'm struck by a sense of loss.

Our phones, tablets, and computers are great tools for efficiently determining the right answers (or at least the general consensus answers: I still prefer my own theory about the ravens). They are tools for testing. But they are emphatically not tools for thinking, which requires curiosity and wonder, which is to say not knowing. The main contribution these tools make to early learning is to help adults get through their top-down curricula more efficiently, but if thinking is our goal, they are emphatically the wrong tools, like using sandpaper to hammer a nail.

Perhaps worse, these correct answer providing machines create the illusion of ultimate answers. They cause us to stop wondering. When we use these wrong tools for the wrong reasons we, in the words of physicist Carlo Rovelli, risk losing "the scientific spirit of distrust in whoever claims to be the one having ultimate answers or privileged access to Truth." Doubt, distrust, and not knowing are essential for thinking to take place.

Someday, these young children will grow into adults need those correct answers and they'll turn to the proper tool. Someday, they'll need efficiency. But right now in these early years, the tools they need are ones that open vistas, that create space for curiosity and wonder, that help them think like a human, not a machine. And that tool isn't a tool at all: it's life itself.

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