Comment by xethos
18 hours ago
The tools we use are not neutral. A sword can be made to work like an axe, but we use axes for chopping wood because a sword makes a shitty axe. A sword is designed to kill people. The handle, the mass, the weight distribution, and every other aspect I am not qualified to get in to, means swords are designed to kill. They are a tool, and their use is not neutral.
This is a clear example, but I don't believe any tools are neutral. Your immediate fallback was to a hammer, not a mouse, with the obvious corrollary being to bludgeon, but the same line applies. Tools are not neutral, and that's why when you looked for something that causes harm, you grabbed something that's objectively been serving a dual-purpose for hundreds of years. Nobody's using a computer mouse to bludgeon someone to death; it makes a shitty bludgeon, and the design of the tool reflects that.
That's also why these comparisons always fall back to knives, or hammers, or the AK-47: they are dangerous tools that are designed to make killing easier. Nobody is making these comparisons to more benign tools, like desk lamps, coffee cups, or car stereos, and it's because tools are not neutral, and none of my examples are designed to make direct, bodily harm, easier.
Murder by computer keyboard: https://www.deseret.com/1997/7/6/19322063/mother-charged-wit...
Murder by ethernet cable: https://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/dead-woman-found-in-pa...
Murder by laptop: https://www.riverfronttimes.com/william-lynn-gunter-sentence...
Murder by cellphone charger: https://lawandcrime.com/crime/pennsylvania-man-admits-to-str...
Murder by desk lamp: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2009/01/08/man-beaten-to-death...
Stabbing by coffee mug: https://www.muscalaw.com/blog/north-port-two-women-attack-co...
My larger point is that nobody - nobody - defaults to telling us the coffee mug is unregulated, as AI allegedly ought to be. They always compare it to something much more commonly used as a weapon; something that, when asked to name a household object likely to be used as a weapon, the average person would guess.
Your point is that people make a stronger argument even when a weaker one would be sufficient?
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The fact that you had to find an article from three decades ago for an instance of killing with a keyboard is telling. All the others aren’t exactly that recent and are mostly isolated cases. Meanwhile, on gun related deaths, there are entire Wikipedia pages for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_mass_shootings_in_the...
There are more mass shootings in the US per year than there are days in a year. It’s so bad they need pages for each individual year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
Meanwhile, pages of deaths perpetrated with household items are curiosities. You parent comment stands: tools are designed for specific purposes and are used for those purposes.
>The fact that you had to find an article from three decades ago for an instance of killing with a keyboard is telling
Yeah, is telling that modern keyboards weight a lot less nowadays, and nobody would use one as a weapon to hit someone else. ;)
The original IBM Model M was 2.3 Kg.
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