Your AI Is Not a Tool - by L. M. Sacasas

The Convivial Society

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Your AI Is Not a Tool<br>The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 5

L. M. Sacasas<br>Jun 22, 2026

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. In this mildly intemperate installment, I vent some frustration at the assertion that AI is “just a tool” and all will be well if we just use it wisely. As is often the case, mileage will vary on the value you find in my observations, but you’ll at least encounter a variety of excellent voices to be in conversation with as you think for yourself about our technological environment.<br>Cheers,<br>Michael

Your AI is not a tool. It is an environment, and you are in it.<br>The same could be said of the whole array of electronic and digital media technologies. I’ve not been especially scrupulous about how I define the particular words we use to talk about various technologies—tools, devices, machines, the Machine, systems, artifacts, instrument, etc.—except to occasionally suggest that the word “technology” itself, used in the all-encompassing sense we use it today, has only enjoyed its extensive semantic range since about the mid-20th century and, precisely because of this extensive semantic range, can be an impediment to clear thinking about the phenomenon to which it lays claim.1<br>But I’m increasingly tempted to become obnoxiously strident about the ubiquitous use of “tool” to describe contemporary technologies, particularly when coupled with “just,” as in “Technology is just a tool. What matters is what we do with it.”<br>While there appears to have been a shift in the last 15 years or so in popular assumptions about the purported neutrality of technology toward at least the suspicion that our devices, etc. are not, in fact, merely neutral instruments at our command but rather frustrate, resist, or otherwise evade uncomplicated mastery by their users, such that their users might be properly said to be used in turn by their devices, it is nonetheless true that the myth of technological neutrality remains broadly entrenched.<br>I confess that I am astounded by how blithely some insist that it is all as simple as learning to use AI well, as if we had not just undergone a nearly 20-year, society-wide experiment showing that a so-called “tool,” say a smartphone or a social media platform, will (mal)form even the most vigilant and virtuous user into its own image and shape. This is the blindness at the heart of modern technological hubris. It is the firm but misguided conviction that our “tools” exist entirely outside of us and thus, if taken up with requisite skill, can be “safely” deployed.<br>But AI is not a tool in this sense, it is an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are using it carefully and intentionally. The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run.<br>This is anecdotal, etc., but here is how one reader put it when I made a preliminary version of this observation on Notes: “From inside a very large company (600,000 people) I get to watch this run in fast-forward. The teams using AI most carefully are the ones losing the ability to tell a good option from a merely safe one. The malformation doesn't skip the diligent. It recruits them.” Just this week over lunch, a highly qualified and skilled computer scientist expressed a similar sentiment. He could feel the subtle shifts in his own awareness and judgment, and he could plainly see the detrimental effects that implementing AI was having on junior colleagues.<br>On this same point—that even careful, self-aware AI use can have unexpected and deleterious consequences—consider Charley Johnson’s patient and irenic critique of Steven Johnson’s exhortation to use AI for cognitive uploading rather than cognitive offloading as well as his advice that we use AI like “a researcher, tutor, and editor at your side.” In conversation with two recent studies (here and here), Charley demonstrates the limitations of this view, observing that “the medium is doing the work, not the information — which is why you can turn down every suggestion and still end up somewhere you wouldn’t have reached alone, feeling the whole time like you walked there on your own two feet.”2 Mileage may vary with regard to the degree of our resistance to cognitive surrender, but we should not be sanguine about our ability to resist.3 And this is because AI is an environment not a tool. I can pick up a tool and put it down, but the environment absorbs me into itself.<br>On this point, McLuhan remains as useful as ever:<br>“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the...