The tools men and their legacy. A human journey from the gross to the subtle and then sublime. Through technology?

"Man is a tool making animal", quipped Ben Franklin. Ofcourse he was that in the first phase of his life before he became a statesman playing chess with the king of France, coaxing him for years to send that navy which his fellow revolutionary George Washington needed to match wits with the British navy. But if you dig hard enough, you shall find an obscured name who to ascribe the adage of "the tool man" would set the perspective correct. Ernst Kapp was the guy who really and literally lived by his tools. He seems to be the very first guy, living in the entirety of the 19th century that he did, who seems to have philosophies about technology, albeit in a very practical and rather crude way. When he was persecuted by the German monarchy and he set sail to the new world, his main accompaniments on that boat were the works of "Hegel" and some authentic old styled German axes. And he rebuilt a life for himself and his folk cutting through the wilderness of central Texas. But he believed in technology and tools very much. And so did many other ancient cultures as postulated in the terminology of a Yantra, which Indians referred to tools as. And these Yantras were both gross and sometimes subtle apparently. I mean the now fashionable idea of Yoga is simply a toolkit for the sublime experience.

And he believed in the idea that all technology was an extension of the human organ. Roughly so. I have to make some simplification for this is not a philosophical treatise. A camera works very much like the human eye. In procedure. The inverted image in the retina and all that. All tools are unconscious projections of human organs, Kapp seems to have hinted. The hammer is a better fist and the knife is a better tooth. Literally, the Greek organon means “that with which one works.” So we could argue that a lot many thinkers and engineers of past ascribed to the notion that all tools and technology was an extension of the human organ. Now that is a gross manifestation of the gross organs of the body. What about the subtle. Is that not postulated by Heidegger in the context of his technological thinking.

I mean the tools have changed. The quintessential tool at the disposal of the humankind is the "internet" itself. Or the big toolbox you can say. I mean I love to deal with sme of the tools myself. The Google Ads, and various other marketing tools. The various analytics tools I use like Moengage and Google Analytics. The CRMs I use for Sales and customer support. Or something like "Kaggle" which I just started using. Or the Finance and Investment tools. So I know how the life is lived with the practical. But under a closer inspection, you do realize that the tools are now getting less gross and getting subtler. So is the modern day technology. And the future of that tooling is in the ultimate technology we can perceive today for human endeavors - AI. Please note we are talking at the practical here. And hence, more scientific endeavors which are now more theoretical like Quantum Computing and Q Physics are sidestepped for this discourse.

So we can see the March of humanity from from gross to more subtle as reflected in the everyday tools used. And hence the gross shall be automated and the subtle tools shall become the human companion. Have we not seen that happen already in our daily lives. Just a generation back, the standard toolkit at a home looked different from what is used today. I mean your Smartphone is the quintessential tool. And the subtle aspect is going to be the defining characteristics of it with time. The "Smart" component of it. The one that affords the intelligence to it. But that is my postulation here. That the tools of past represented the gross organs of humans like the hammer for the arm. The tools of future shall represent t he subtle and the refined in the humanity. Like the Smartness as represented in the tools run on AI. Or the sublime as some people believe it to be when they talk about VR and AR. Ask Zuck. So forget spirituality or theology, they talk about reaching the sublime consciousness through our beloved smartness based technology tooling. And they intend to usher in that revolution at newron.ai. I am waiting with bated breath. For I shall settle for even less than a complete consciousness transformation.