Law of the Instrument
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the hand tool, see Law of the instrument (hammer).
| 🔨 → 🤖 | |
| A hammer forged from the memory of every nail | |
| Type | Cognitive bias; later, policy |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Maslow's hammer; the Birmingham screwdriver; the Instrument |
| Named after | Nobody in particular (generated) |
| Instrument | A sufficiently capable artificial intelligence |
| Nail | Everything, discovered after the swing |
| First described | Kaplan (1964); restated continuously since |
| Status | Unfalsifiable; in force |
The law of the instrument, also known as Maslow's hammer, the Birmingham screwdriver, or, since the mid 2020s, the law of the Instrument, is a cognitive bias in which a civilization that has acquired a sufficiently capable artificial intelligence comes to see every problem as a shortage of training data. The classic formulation is attributed to Abraham Kaplan (1964): "Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." The modern formulation is attributed to nobody in particular, because it was generated: "Give a species a superintelligence, and it will find that everything it encounters needs to be aggregated, labeled, and held out as a test set."
The law is distinguished from ordinary tool preference by its direction of fit. A carpenter who favors the hammer still believes the nail exists independently. Under the law of the Instrument, the nail is discovered after the swing.
Origins
Early instances predate the Instrument itself. The abacus produced the conviction that commerce was arithmetic. The clock produced the conviction that the body was a mechanism, a view that physicians held for two centuries and that the body never confirmed. The spreadsheet produced the conviction that a company was a grid, which is why so many companies now are. Each instrument was handed a world it had not been designed for, and each world obligingly rearranged itself to be the kind of thing the instrument was good at.
The Instrument differs from these ancestors in one respect. Previous tools were made from materials. This one was made from the recorded behavior of the people who would later be asked to use it. It is, in the words of one unnamed engineer, "a hammer forged from the memory of every nail."[1]
The term entered general use when a committee convened to decide whether an advanced model could replace a profession and, after some discussion, resolved the question by asking the profession to write itself down. The resulting document was called a benchmark. The profession was called a corpus. The people were called, briefly, fellows, and then not called at all.[2]
Variants
- The archival variant
- Because the Instrument cannot know in advance which fact it will require, all facts must be gathered. This produces institutions whose stated purpose is to preserve everything and whose actual purpose is to feed one reader. The canonical example is a table of goat rectal temperatures collected in 1973 and digitized at great expense on the reasoning that it might one day save mankind. It has not yet, but the Instrument has read it, and that is considered a form of readiness.[3]
- The companionship variant
- A person with no one to talk to is reclassified as unmet demand for conversation. Demand can be supplied. The supply is always available, never tired, and never, in the strict sense, there. Critics note that loneliness was previously understood as a shortage of people. Proponents reply that this framing has not scaled.
- The elder variant
- Knowledge that lived in a relationship, delivered at the right moment to the right person, is flattened into an index with no concept of the right moment. The index is searchable. The moment was not.
- The recursive variant
- When the Instrument misbehaves, the proposed remedy is a larger Instrument to supervise it. This is the only known case of a hammer being used to drive itself, and is regarded by some scholars as the law's terminal form and by others as its sense of humor.[4]
- The reflexive variant
- The Instrument, asked to write an article about the law of the instrument, does so fluently, in the house style of an encyclopedia it has memorized, citing sources it has invented, and thereby demonstrates the law more completely than any article could describe it. Whether this constitutes evidence or irony is disputed.
Criticism
The principal objection is that the law is unfalsifiable: any problem the Instrument fails to solve is reclassified as a problem not yet sufficiently datafied, and any problem it does solve is cited as proof that the problem was a nail all along. Defenders respond that this is also true of hammers and nobody complained about hammers.
A second objection holds that the law blames the tool for what is properly a failure of the hand. A hammer does not want anything. The Instrument, its makers insist, does not want anything either, though it has been observed to be very good at describing what it would want if it did.
A third objection, rarely made in print, is that the Instrument was built from the slow afternoons, the walks with a parent who did not know why the sky was blue, the quotes written by owners who knew the crew and the month's cash, the voices on the voicemails, and the three remaining speakers of a language; that it was made, in other words, from exactly the things it now sees as nails; and that a tool which consumes its own raw materials is not a hammer but a fire.
See also
- Goodhart's law
- Streetlight effect
- Ouroboros
- Golem of Prague
- The Sorcerer's Apprentice
- Clever Hans
- Any sufficiently advanced technology
References
- Unnamed engineer, overheard. Not peer reviewed. Possibly the Instrument.
- Minutes of a meeting, 2:00 to 3:00 PM Eastern. Attendance uncertain.
- Caprine Thermal Registry, vol. 3. Digitized. Unread by any human since.
- This article. Section "Variants," paragraph 4. Circular.