[Dalewyn]

Do I really need to spell out the fact that computers are a means to an end? Not the end to a means?

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given the HN audience, but come on. Ordinary people use computers because they need or want to do something, and a computer will help them do it.

[eimrine]

Computers are not a means to an end any more. Computers are the end to a means since the ordinary user has no more choice not to use a computer at all. Ordinary people in 2020's use computers because a computer is the God, not because the man wants to run some program on it.

[nonrandomstring]

> Ordinary people in 2020's use computers because a computer is the > God, not because the man wants to run some program on it.

Good point. Is something a tool still if the user has no choice but to use it?

Certainly it is no longer "an extension of the mind-body and will" as some philosophers define "tool".

Is it a crutch? And does that imply that we have become "disabled" or are now "differently abled but dependent"?

I think the GP's appeal to simple dignity of labour and clear purpose troubles me for other reasons though.

All tools shape their users, and none more-so than a computer. So much indeed that I think it deserves a different status. It's a different quality of tool than a hammer. Today, it very much uses you in equal measure to you using it.

Calling computers (mere) tools seems a little dismissive.

And in that regard I think the GP shows a typical nonchalance around what they _think_ is their (very mysterious and serious) "doings".

When a system already defines all the possibilities for what you can make and do, and these days it even curates, censors, "corrects" and extrapolates for you... what is left of that glorious will to action (doing)?

Has it been magnified such that it's "AIA" = AI aligns with IA (artificial intelligence is aligned with intelligence amplifications) and the tool is a lever (bicycle) for the mind?

Or are we cranking the handle on a auto-cookie-cutter machine that gives a choice of three shapes? That can feel a lot like "doing" stuff too.

The closer one is to that kind of "doing on rails" the more vulnerable to being replaced by a robot/algorithm.

OTOH, remembering how to see computers as engines of possibility rather than certainty again (as Ada Lovelace did), seems to me more where humans fit with computers. YMMV

[Dalewyn]

>their (very mysterious and serious) "doings".

Seeing as this needs demystifying for some bizarre reason...:

* Office work (including literally Microsoft Office documents, no substitutes acceptable).

* Occasional specialist work (CAD, Adobe Illustrator, etc.)

* Play; a man needs his vidja gaemz and some cold beer at the end of a long day.

[nonrandomstring]

Yeah sorry I didn't mean to be rude other than to josh you about mysterious "doings".

You made it sound like they were somehow special, like, I dunno, particle physics that could only run on a custom quantum computer.

Now you're specific, looks like those are all perfectly normal and ordinary things, right?

I also had to use a very specialist CAD system. In those days the only things it would run on were Sun Microsystems and HP Unix boxen.

Other than Microsoft's monopoly grip, and your need to interface with other use ^H^H^Hvictims of that monopoly, is there any reason you wouldn't try a friendlier, more socially conscious solution?

[Dalewyn]

I mean, I would first point out Linux and FOSS aren't a "friendlier" solution.

Daring to ask about a problem will inevitably devolve into "You're committing heresy." and getting taken for a ride about changing my entire process and environment when that was never my inquiry nor even desirable.

As for socially conscious: Paying for good, practical software that serves my needs is a good thing. Both for myself and the developers, a win-win.

FOSS has a social contract problem. There are many open source developers who need/want money for their labor who get shut down and even coerced into free-as-in-beer for daring to ask for compensation, and many more project derelicts strewing the land abandoned due to lack of resources.

[nonrandomstring]

> fact that computers are a means to an end?

I see no fact here.

If you think about it computers have done as much to reveal and create new ends as they have to satisfy existing ones.