> Is a gun less ethical than a syringe because it can be used for violence? A gun's purpose is to shoot bullets. A syringe has the purpose of delivering fluid

> Is a gun less ethical than a syringe because it can be used for violence? A gun's purpose is to shoot bullets. A syringe has the purpose of delivering fluid into the human body. It's not hard to evaluate the ethics of the most common actions for each of those. While the tool itself technically has no ethics, owning or using the tool tends to have ethical implications. In a practical world, it is very fair to evaluate those implications, at least at an estimation level. Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of complexity when it comes to tools and ethics and no easy answers, and with the luddite example it brings in questions of work ethics and societal structure, so the loom doesn't exist in a vacuum. But not all tools bring in the entirety of ethics into consideration. There are ethical estimations of tools (think of them as potential ethical energy) that we can try to estimate. Syringe > Gun seems like one we can make. Gun vs Nuke, a bit harder due to the consideration of use vs threat of use. The loom alone is pretty neutral and is far more reflective of direct context, where the context of a gun or syringe generalizes easier. And of course these are all my calculations, and you and others can have different ones, but I think if we really decided to spend 8 hours nailing down this discussion, you would indeed see a loose tiering/ranking of tools and "potential ethical energy". I wouldn't be surprised to see other measures/categories emerge either such as severity, risk, and commonality of use case. The question becomes this: what is the "potential ethical energy" of AI. IMO it's very close to the loom in that the context matters the most, but there's also a severity of effect factor in play that makes it more dangerous. Still, I would say AI has an overall positive potential ethical energy.