Pick up a hammer. When you’re actually hammering, focused, in the work, where is the hammer?
It’s not in your awareness. You’re aware of the nail, the wood, the thinfg you’re building. The hammer has disappeared. It became an extension of your intention. Heidegger called this ready-to-hand. The tool that works vanishes into use.
Now drop the hammer. Or the head flies off. Or it’s too heavy. Suddenly the hammer is very present. You’re looking at it, thinking about it, dealing with it as an object. Heidegger called this present-at-hand. The tool that fails becomes a thing.
This isn’t just about hammers. Everything you’re fluent with disappears this way. Language disappears when you’re thinking. The keyboard disappears when you’re writing. Your car disappears when you’re driving a familiar route.
Fluency is a disappearance. Expertise is the capacity to make complex things vanish into use.
And here’s what follows that Winograd and Flores saw clearly: computers were designed on the assumption that thinking is always present-at-hand. That cognition is conscious manipulation of visible symbols. But most of human intelligence operates in the disappeared state. In the ready-to-hand. In the background that never gets formalized because it doesn’t need to be, until breakdown.
You’re using AI to write code. The code appears. It works, mostly. The AI and the process become ready-to-hand, they disappear into your workflow.
Then something breaks.
And you discover that unlike the hammer, this tool has no weight you ever felt. No grain you learned. No resistance that taught you anything. It disappeared before you ever held it.
The question Flores was asking in 1986 is the question we’re living now, what happens when the tools we depend on most completely are the ones we understand least?
@ Lee Greene