The Use and Abuse of Tools

“When you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail.”

Something about tools. We love them. Pete Seeger’s protest anthem “If I Had a Hammer,” sung by all the folk singers in the ’60s, was written as a tool for building a better world. “I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.” Right on! Just ask a Boomer.

When everything looks like a nail, though, odds are you’re using that hammer for the wrong job. Of course you wouldn’t use a hammer to get the lint out of your cellphone’s charging port, but didn’t I see you using it to crack open crab legs at that picnic last summer?

My mom was horrified to find out one afternoon in 1954 that the pounding noise she’d been hearing was 5-year-old me out on the concrete patio breaking open rocks with my dad’s claw hammer. I just wanted to see if any of them had interesting colors inside. Mom fainted when I came in, bleeding from a cut next to my eye where a flying chip had bounced off my face.

I didn’t think the rocks were nails, but I could tell the hammer would crack them open. It wasn’t so much the wrong tool as the wrong job.

The wrong tool for the job problem is frequently a problem of scale. When the tool is too big, it’s “killing a fly with a cannon.”

The summer we lived by the Frio River in West Texas, the self-sufficient 85-year-old lady down the road killed a rattlesnake coiled on her TV with one blast from her shotgun. The rattler was taken care of, but unfortunately, she had to go buy a new TV to watch The PTL Club again.

Tool too small? You wouldn’t use a soup spoon to dig a ditch. You reach for a shovel. Or better yet: Fire up the backhoe.

There’s also the temptation of tools when they are new.

A great example of this brand-new hammer error was the horrifying 1963 proposal to blast a 2-mile-long, 300-foot-deep trench through a mountain in the Mojave Desert to create a straighter path for Interstate 40. It was called “Operation Carryall.”

What was so horrifying about it?

Well, only that the Atomic Energy Commission planned to detonate 22 buried atomic bombs for the excavation.

It was 1963, and America had an arsenal of nuclear weapons with no war to use them in. The bombs were the hammer, and the Bristol Mountains in California looked like nails.

We have mixed feelings about our tools, maybe even since the Stone Age.

On the one hand, tools do make work easier. Who’s against that?

Antipater of Thessalonica wrote a poem 2,000 years ago celebrating a new mechanical grain grinder powered by a water wheel. In the poem, the women who’ve been rising before dawn to begin the back-breaking work of grinding the day’s wheat for bread are told to sleep late. Now that the watermill does all the heavy work, they can enjoy the life of Riley and eat without working.

An old story: every new tool is sold with the dazzling promise of abundance enjoyed in leisure.

Except the water-powered mill didn’t do all the work, did it? There was still the hard labor of tilling fields, planting and harvesting crops, long days in the steamy kitchens where the food was cooking, and stoking the ovens where the bread was baking. Sorry, Antipater, first-century Greece didn’t get to enjoy a post-work economy after all.

The ancient poem’s grain mill didn’t get people back to the mythical Golden Age of no work, and neither have our even more capable machines. We have microwaves in our kitchens now, but is making a meal just pushing a button?

Like whack-a-mole, work just won’t go away.

During the Industrial Revolution, automated, steam-powered looms made weaving cloth easier. But angry Luddites wrecked them because work at the dark satanic mills was repetitive and dangerous, and anyway, the machines were eliminating all the old jobs. That’s when people started worrying about our tools getting out of hand.

Mickey Mouse was overwhelmed by his enchanted broomstick in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment of Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.” The magician’s spell Mickey borrowed was supposed to make the broom do the work of fetching water so he could loaf around. The disastrous unintended consequence was that the busy broom didn’t stop when the job was done. It kept on at its increasingly furious pace. Mickey panicked and tried to make it stop, but there was no OFF button.

Remember when HAL, the computer running the space station in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” went rogue? To preserve its continuing operation, the supercomputer kept the human crew it was supposedly assisting from turning it off.

Our tools come with a bright and a dark side. While we are nervous about self-driving cars on the roads and dread nuclear waste with 10,000-year half-lives, no one wants to scrap all the machines and return to scratching out a subsistence living equipped with homemade yam sticks and flint knives. Let’s save all the labor we can and enjoy our tool-assisted leisure.

However, when we hear that autonomous, self-improving AI is becoming so powerful that it will end human work as we know it, we are predisposed to listen.

And worry once again about new tools.

Dan Clouse lives in Lakebay.